"Pioneer [Reventlo] was a sort of ghost in that he had a very loose association between body and soul. He was inhabited a little by the ‘Eden Archetype,’ a projection from the future. He knew of course . . . that all archetypes are these projections from the future and none of them from the past. And yet he sincerely believed it was the past he was excavating.” They were all quiet for a day and a night and a day. Then the spirit came and moved over them. But which way did it move? Someone should do a piece on the connection between the Collective Unconscious and Purgatory, and discover whether the name of the connecting land is not Middle-Earth. But Christ suffuses Purgatory, and Christ is the Lord of the Archetypes in the unconscious. — “Tolkien as Christian” Advanced Lafferty. Today I want to play with some ideas around media ecology. This came to mind because of how Lafferty toys with Marshall McLuhan and Teilhard de Chardin. Both figures are central to his short story "Great Day in the Morning," the subject of my last post. They're also very important to his novel The Elliptical Grave. In fact, I think the novel is unintelligible without them. After writing The Elliptical Grave, Lafferty largely leaves Teilhard and McLuhan behind, those two meteors of the 1960s. He enters his final phase and tries to become popular again by exploiting pulp tropes, but by then he is too much himself. No number of space pirates (Annals of Klepsis) or Arabian Nights adventures (Sindbad: The 13th Voyage) was going to win him a larger audience. The turn to pulp did, however, revivify ideas that had become too occulted for all but his most dedicated readers. This helps explain both the great unpublished novels of the 1970s, with their extreme demands, and the bewilderment produced by the few that squeaked into print. Think Apocalypses. In Lafferty's correspondence, the earliest mention of the book I know of is in a letter to Sheryl Smith, where he ends a 1977 letter with "Elliptically yours (the next novel is The Elliptical Grave)." In the letters that I have read, mentions of the book disappear until 1988, when it is again mentioned to Dan Knight in the preparation of the verse brought together in the thin volume Strange Skies. There one will find the following poem: In August 1988, Lafferty told Knight he was reluctant to send the manuscript because he didn't have extra copies. He said, I'll send you the ELLIPTICAL GRAVE today or tomorrow. I didn't send it to you before because I didn't find any extra copy (the one I am sending you is the only one I have, so send it back someday), and because it doesn't really seem very good to me when I dip into it again." Then he added, "I hope you're not too disappointed in The Elliptical Grave." What is clear when you read these letters is that Lafferty was eager but not in a rush to see it published. He sent his letter to Dan Knight to Virginia Kidd for her thoughts on what to do with the book. He later assured Knight that there wouldn't be any impediment to moving toward publication, and that he knew Virginia Kidd just sometimes takes her time answering them. In 1989, Lafferty wrote to Knight again, saying, "I look forward to seeing the publication and also that of The Elliptical Grave. We will have to come up with 3 catchy subtitles for the three parts of EG." In March of 1989, Lafferty expressed his desire to see the book released as an independent, stand-alone publication by United Mythologies Press. He wrote, "Sure, I'd like to see The Elliptical Grave published as a complete book." In June of 1989, Lafferty says he is delighted to hear that Virginia Kidd has greenlit the project. He wrote, "I'm glad that Virginia sent the message down the Mount and that The Elliptical Grave will soon be printed and bound and published. I think EG will be a pretty good book, with or without the art." Also in June, Lafferty told Knight to stagger the releases of Dotty and The Elliptical Grave, "Put it aside though for a couple of months after THE ELLIPTICAL GRAVE is published, and see how EG does . . . I don't want you to be weighted down with two rocks around your neck at the same time." In August 1989, Lafferty mailed Dan Knight the signed pages that would be part of the book's limited run. In September of 1989, Lafferty praised what Knight had produced. Turning now to The Elliptical Grave, I’ll point out something obvious: it will never have many readers. I imagine that its readers number in the hundreds at most, and I’m a little skeptical that most people who start it finish it. It is Lafferty at his most extreme. He once told Dan Knight that it was his least publishable book. Andrew Ferguson is right, I think, to call it Lafferty’s second important book on the nature of media. Lafferty wrote many short stories about media in the 1970s, but The Elliptical Grave is his attempt to put those ideas together. It is a really demanding book. Let’s boil the plot down to its essentials before turning to what the novel says about media. I want to create a tool that shows how I think it works as a system of media, not as a haphazard series of strange devices. In this diagram, the center is what I'm calling the formed receiver. That would be the body, person, and company, the place where any medium becomes active. Around that center are the novel's main channels of mediation. These are things like: body language instrument air space ritual “Pioneer was a sort of ghost in that he had a very loose association between body and soul. He was inhabited a little by the ‘Eden Archetype,’ a projection from the future. He knew of course . . . that all archetypes are these projections from the future and none of them from the past. And yet he sincerely believed it was the past he was excavating.” The diagram has left and right poles, which make a temporal argument. The left pole is archive, by which I mean inherited trace: the dead, fossils, hands, air, and memory as a bodily medium. The novel returns obsessively to these things. The right pole is archetype. As I understand it in The Elliptical Grave, archetype exerts pressure from the future. It has an eschatological pull. Here Lafferty is thinking with Teilhard de Chardin again. Strange forms appear before they can be described or fitted into a narrative. Reventlo’s great error is to confuse the two poles ("The 'Golden Age' is not past. It begins tomorrow."). He mistakes archetypal pressure, which comes from the future, for archival memory. The upper and lower poles show the moral stakes. Media may lead upward toward communion and metamorphosis or downward toward domination and enclosure. They may be things people inhabit or things that possess and enclose them. This is the difference between the coffin and the cocoon, between burial as termination and gestation as passage. The ark, the ouroboros, and the novel itself complicate this division. If one reads the novel as Lafferty constructed it, one ends up inside it, which is to say inside the pavilion at the end. Finally, I thought it would be fun to take up an idea of Marshall McLuhan’s that has received little attention: the tetrad. Near the end of his life, McLuhan began searching for a common form through which any medium could be understood. Drawing on his work on figure and ground, he developed the tetrad with his son Eric and experimented with it for years. It was published posthumously in Laws of Media, after Lafferty had written The Elliptical Grave. A later book, The Lost Tetrads of Marshall McLuhan, presented McLuhan’s own experiments with the form. Every tetrad asks four questions of a human medium: What does it enhance? What does it displace? What older forms or media does it retrieve? What does it become when pushed to an extreme, at which point the medium tends to flip? These effects, Marshall McLuhan thought, are simultaneous dimensions latent in any medium, so we're not dealing with sequence. This first diagram shows what a tetrad is and how the tetrad illustrates what McLuhan called the four laws of media. With the tetrad in place, we can ask: What is the elliptical grave as a medium? The pavilion gathers persons, images, objects, animals, and different times into a strange enclosure spanning the distance from archive to archetype. It ceases to be a place observed from outside and becomes a vessel whose occupants are caught up in its action. At the point of reversal, stasis may become voyage, while enclosure may become burial or open into birth. Lafferty leaves the direction uncertain. At the end of the novel, he tells us that the Holy Spirit moves, but not in which direction. Now, I think we can start to look at how he arrives at this meta-medium of elliptical grave through other forms of mediation Cinema is one of the novel’s main tests of presence. At first, it belongs to the ghostly economy of the pavilion. Cecelia calls early cinema “real ghost movies,” and the screen becomes a contested place where ghosts, actors, and spectators compete for reality. Fritz Otto’s projections go further. He does not merely show images. He “projected total darkness” and then gave the company coffins “that weren’t there. But they were there.” One projected coffin leaves behind “rich cream-gray velvet.” The image has crossed into matter. By the time the pavilion itself “sailed directly into the cinema,” film is no longer representation in the ordinary sense. It has become an event, a medium that captures bodies, alters space, and draws the spectator into the action it projects. Another technological medium that Lafferty creates for the novel is what he calls scanners and reconstructors. Scanners recover the traces that ordinary observations can't reach, and reconstructors turn those traces into what might be called conjectural seeds. Lafferty is pretty clear in distinguishing the two. The scanners, he writes, "do good work," while the reconstructors are "speculating and guessing machines." The upshot of this is that mediation is a genuine extension of knowledge, but not every mediation is an account of truth. The Promethean Company is the collective name for the novel’s cast of investigators. It, too, functions as one of the book’s media. Jeffery Wind gives the clue when he calls the expedition “a particular singular device” and says that “this device will tell us what we ourselves are all about.” Its method is corporate perception. Lucille says that the Prometheans must be “both open and fastidious,” open to “outlandish persons and ideas and things,” because no single discipline is adequate to White Goat Valley. As the pavilion closes around them, this collective instrument can no longer observe from outside. Abramswell says that the haunted air must be seen “as being inside it,” and the trapped party gathers “all in one people.” By the end, the Prometheans are “the most variously talented group in the world,” but they are also the material under trial. They have “formed ourselves into a group to mutate.” Post-alphabetical thought is where the McLuhan connection becomes hardest to miss. Reventlo begins the novel with a huge claim: primordial language was richer than modern language and that surviving “post-alphabetical forms” lie buried in later speech. Vivian Oldshoe and Curtis Bald at first seem to confirm him, since they “understand each other perfectly” while everyone else lags behind. Do they have access to the primordial language? If so, it seems to join movement, image, speed, gesture, and writing into a communicative medium. Their acrobatics, for instance, are called “bee-dances in the air,” but Vivian says that the medium is not “in words yet.” Finally, we have been spatializing the logic of The Elliptical Grave. We can now resequence it with these points in mind, with Teilhard on one side and McLuhan on the other: Bioscopic messages orient the company toward the pavilion; The pavilion closes around them; Projected coffins take on material form; The enclosure becomes coffin, cocoon, ark, ship, and world; The film absorbs the Promethean Company that enters it. Through the tetrads, this sequence draws the novel’s separate media into a single action, but it does not flatten that action to a univocal meaning. The pavilion is a grave, but it is also a cocoon, an ark, a ship, and a world. This is what tetrads try to show through the logic of mutually implicating enhancement, reversal, obsolescence, and retrieval. Each medium in the novel reverses into a condition that changes those who enter it. The enclosure may be burial because the company is sealed within it; it may be divine judgment because the members are tested; it may be birth because the cocoon will take the pupa and make it an imago; it may be a stranger transformation, with the Promethean Company as the material of some woollier mutation. These possibilities do not cancel one another. As McLuhan writes, “The tetrads of Laws of Media present not sequential but simultaneous facets of media effects” (127). I am tempted to leave it there, but my current reading of the novel’s ending reads it as one of Lafferty's finest and most esoteric Half Horrors. It is pessimistic about Promethean mastery. The Promethean Company ends up trapped in a media environment that isolates its members. It takes their tools, breaks them, and forces them to face their impending deaths like people suffocating inside a locked safe. Why? The great leap, in this novel, cannot be achieved through smarter technology, better language, cleverer science, or human media. The Lord of the Archetypes calls from the future, which Reventlo mistakes for the archive. This signal from the future passes through the “elliptical grave” of the present world, which collapses inward and becomes a sunken grave waiting for the Holy Spirit to move over it.

Jackson Square, New Orleans Refrain: Great day! Great day, the righteous marching; Great day! God’s going to build up Zion’s walls! Great day! Great day, the righteous marching; Great day! God’s going to build up Zion’s walls! 1 Chariot rode on the mountain top, God’s going to build up Zion’s walls! My God spoke and the chariot did stop,* God’s goin’ to build up Zion’s walls! [Refrain] 2 This is the day of jubilee, God’s going to build up Zion’s walls! The Lord has set His people free, God’s going to build up Zion’s walls! [Refrain] “I am having some second thoughts for this day,” Duffy said. He was amazed. People were dismantling and taking off the walls of all the buildings. The buildings, without the support of the walls, didn't seem to collapse one floor upon another, though some of them sagged a little. “Faith maintains better than walls,” a pious and bearded teenager said. “Walls were the enemy of freedom.” Then he began to pull out his beard in big hunks. * Even now, workmen as well as owners were taking the wheels off cars and putting on something else, something that came out of a kit. “Are you sure that that, whatever it is that comes out of the kits, is better than wheels?” Duffy asked a young car owner who was making the changeover himself. In space, as in duration, the peduncle (or, which comes to the same thing, the bud) of a living branch corresponds to a minimum of differentiation, expansion, and resistance. What, then, will be the effect of time on this area of weakness? Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, 120–21. The holy figure of the demiurge Teilhard had come down on the altar. With him appeared McLuhan on his right hand and McGonigal on his left. They were transfigured with light. “Lord, it is good that we be here,” the Unfaithful Assembled intoned. “Great Day.” “Peduncle, peduncle, Point Edhead, cosmogenization, valorization, obfuscation. Great Day,” the holy demiurge blessed them. “Lord, let us build three tents here,” the Unfaithful Assembled intoned. “Great Day.” “Peduncle, neo-anthropocentrism, corpusculization, nookonos, peduncle. Great Day,” the holy demiurge blessed again. Lafferty completed "Great Day in the Morning" on March 24, 1973. It appeared two years later in Damon Knight's Orbit 17. One wonders what anyone made of it. It is such a sly story, and I suspect the readers of Orbit were unlikely to pick out its exact reversal of Telyard's design, the entire reason Lafferty wrote the piece. Nowadays, not many people talk about Teilhard. There is almost no online discussion of the story. The R. A. Lafferty Devotional Page rates it as “lame”: Unsurprisingly, no one has written anything substantial about it. Like several other pendant pieces to the Argo legend, there is a complicating factor with it, because “Great Day in the Morning” has a complicated relation to Lafferty’s metaphysics of time in his first major cycle. The Great Day is one of the Seven Roads in Argo. These roads are those seven possible “endings” of the Argo cycle, all contingent but one somehow always being necessarily contingent so that Duffey's ashes end up in the box, a topic for another time. Today I want to set the Seven Roads aside, as fascinating as they are. The proximate background matters more. Miss that background, and one will be lost. Maybe the story is lame, but you ought to know it on its own terms. Besides, there is no reason not to bracket Duffey’s larger arc when thinking through the Great Day. (A note: the name is spelled “Duffy” in the Orbit version.) After all, Lafferty published this story as a freestanding work. It reads wonderfully on its own. One gets RAL launching his strongest and most pyrotechnic attack on Teilhard de Chardin, the French Jesuit priest and paleontologist who became a spirochaete on the Catholic laity of 1960s America. "Great Day in the Morning" is a full-on assault on what Lafferty took to be a prime expression of theological modernism in his own time. That alone makes “Great Day in the Morning” an interesting story. It might only interest someone who would bother with a forgotten science fiction story from 1973, written to satirize a dead theological trend from the 1960s, which mocked a pretentious prose poem written in a Chinese desert in 1923. But that is Lafferty. So the events first, then what Lafferty did with them. Start with a brute fact. Teilhard is an important presence in Lafferty. Very important. The 1960s fascination with him feels as dated as bell-bottom jeans. Teilhard comes with another downside: his jargon-riddled work creates a high barrier for new readers of Lafferty. It is an open question how many Lafferty fans have ever read a page of Teilhard. But they should, because aspects of the Teilhard thing recur throughout Lafferty’s fiction, from Fourth Mansions to “How Many Miles to Babylon?” There is a wrinkle with all this Teilhardism, though. Teilhard just isn’t a major generative source of Lafferty’s own wild ideas. Charles Fort was different: he fed Lafferty’s imagination and got into the woodwork of his private symbol system. No, when it comes to Teilhard, Lafferty usually gives him no more than a sharp elbow. Teilhard is hugely important in Lafferty, but mostly as shorthand. He appears often, but Lafferty seldom works with his ideas. That is what makes Lafferty’s beef with Teilhardism tricky. A few examples. In “Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne,” readers are given funny asides aimed at Teilhard. Most readers will instantly forget them. Yet an impoverished world honors Teilhard as one of its few thinkers. In contrast, a richer alternate world recognizes Teilhard as “a talented science fiction writer with a talent for outre burlesque,” and Lafferty writes, “What a shaggy comic extravaganza he did make of it!” Teilhard is, however, essential to “Old Foot Forgot.” Sometimes he is just a name, as in Clement Chardin in “The Transcendent Tigers”; sometimes, he is one of his ideas, as he is the “noospheric fault” in “Narrow Valley.” One finds him showing up in the unpublished “Ahoy the Whale.” And in “The Forty-Seventh Island” and “Along the San Pennatus Fault,” he represents much of what Lafferty most dislikes: theological modernism linked to an ideology of science. Unlike Marx, however, Teilhard is an enemy within Lafferty’s own camp. He is a Catholic, and his Catholicism connects him with Marshall McLuhan in “Great Day in the Morning,” since McLuhan was also a Roman Catholic. I enjoy very little about Teilhard, but understanding him is important for understanding Lafferty. His significance lies less in what he thought than in what he gave Lafferty: an anti-image against which to fashion his own counter-eschatological fiction. Lafferty fashioned elements of this anagogical fiction in opposition to the principal elements of Teilhardism. His many versions of the leap reject the Omega Point. Not for Lafferty were Teilhard’s flirtation with an immanent cosmos or the coat of paint he put on physicalism. As Lafferty wrote in his essay “The World’s Narration”: Tracing the symptoms back to the ‘disease’ does indicate that the disease is multiple, that it has such names as Hard Science Fiction, Soft Science Fiction, High Fantasy, Low Fantasy, Non-Conforming Adventure Fiction. And sometimes it bears such non-consensus names as Biological Fiction, Ontological Fiction, Eschatological Fiction (did Teilhard, for instance, know that he was writing Eschatological Fiction?), Theological Fiction, or Psychological or Philosophical or Technological or Geological or Historical Fiction. These things and many others share the same complex of symptoms. What is Lafferty if not a writer of Eschatological Fiction? What is Lafferty if not “a talented science fiction writer with a talent for outre burlesque” who often makes “a shaggy comic extravaganza” out of it? Teilhard de Chardin Teilhard’s big idea was a nutty theory about cosmic evolution, brilliantly taken apart by Peter Medawar, something Teilhard himself called cosmogenesis. It is nothing short of the galaxy-brain process by which everything drives toward an increasingly organized cosmos. Teilhard describes humanity’s eventual gathering as “the natural culmination of a cosmic processus of organisation,” and identifies noogenesis as that “in which cosmogenesis, as regards our experience, culminates” (The Phenomenon of Man, 243, 297). This cosmic development follows a supposed law of complexity-consciousness: as matter undergoes greater complexification, its interior dimension rises toward consciousness. More complexity equals more consciousness. Teilhard condenses the principle into two equations: “Evolution = Rise of consciousness” and “Rise of consciousness = Union effected” (243). Along the way, evolution crosses successive thresholds. At the material level is what is often called the geosphere, object of geogenesis and the “rocky lithosphere.” Above it appears the biosphere, “the living membrane composed of the fauna and flora of the globe” (180). Then comes the Teilhardian leap: psychogenesis gives way to noogenesis, producing the planetary “thinking layer,” for “outside and above the biosphere there is the noosphere” (181). Teilhard uses hominization to describe this transition, first as “the individual and instantaneous leap from instinct to thought,” and more broadly as “the progressive phyletic spiritualisation in human civilisation” of forces inherited from animal life (180). Within the noosphere, technological communication and human interdependence produce what Teilhard calls “human Planetisation,” or elsewhere socialization, drawing peoples into “a movement of convergence” (243). This convergence is accompanied by interiorization, for Teilhard says that making room for thought requires him to “interiorise matter” (290). Crucial for Lafferty’s parody of Teilhard, his theory of convergence does not dissolve individuality. As persons approach Omega, Teilhard says that “each particular consciousness” becomes “still more itself and thus more clearly distinct from others” (261). He has a slogan for this: “union differentiates”: unification leads to greater personalization, since “we can only find our person by uniting together” (262). The whole evolutionary process is directed toward the Omega Point, the transcendent and already active center that draws evolution forward and gathers differentiated persons into perfected unity. Teilhard imagines his Omega to possess “autonomy, actuality, irreversibility” and “transcendence.” He even calls it “a divine focus of mind which draws it onward” (270). The eschatological completion of cosmogenesis is Christogenesis: “If the world is convergent and if Christ occupies its centre,” Teilhard writes, then Christogenesis is the extension of noogenesis and the culmination of cosmogenesis (297). This final fullness is the Pleroma, which The Phenomenon of Man describes as “perfect unity,” in which “each element will reach its consummation at the same time as the universe” and “God shall be all in all” (294). Lafferty thinks all this is nonsense, and he fully rejects the notion that Teilhardian union would really differentiate. Poking fun at this fantasy of cosmic fusion that contrasts so vividly with something like Lafferty’s view of the Body of Christ underlies much of what “Great Day in the Morning” does. Where Teilhard goes cosmically big, Lafferty goes into reverse, winding everything down to a parody of the Omega Point. In the story, it takes the form of devolution down to a single cell. A wonderful diagram in The Phenomenon of Man clarifies Teilhard’s vision. It shows anthropogenesis and offers a useful visual key to Lafferty’s reversal. Beyond providing necessary context for “Great Day in the Morning,” the diagram has a fun connection to Austro. One can imagine the line going off at the bottom from Australopith leading directly to “Barnaby’s Clock.” The diagram sticks in my mind because it is like a strange attractor for so much in Lafferty. One could use it to talk about all three of his major cycles. Before getting any deeper into what Lafferty is doing with Teilhard, let’s rehearse the plot of “Great Day in the Morning.” The story opens with Melchisedech Duffey taking a walk in New Orleans before dawn. He is stopped by three men who declare that the “Great Day” has arrived. To demonstrate this new era, they hold him down and remove the minute hand from his watch, explaining that “even you must realize that time is not overly particularized on the Great Day.” Duffey keeps his routine and visits a coffee shop, where the waitress and customers are drinking coffee without cups. They rely on blind faith to contain the liquid because “It isn’t right that anything should be contained by anything else.” Duffey can't go along with this and asks for a pour of hot coffee, which spills directly onto his bare hand and scalds it. This, in turn, breaks everyone's “faith,” causing the other customers’ cupless coffee to splash down their arms just as they take a drink. Duffey next goes to a newspaper office to complain about the morning edition. The paper lacks a date, page numbers, and standard articles. An editorial assistant says that names and titles have been abolished because “Names are enslaving,” adding that they now only work when they feel like it in the name of “job enrichment.” Walking back through the city, Duffey sees traffic signals flashing subjective phrases like “To stop is to die” instead of colors and observes vehicles moving without wheels. Citizens physically dismantle building walls and remove their clothing, acting on the new societal rule that “Faith maintains better than walls” and that individuals must “be unenclosed, be emancipated, be unstructured.” Looking for a familiar place, Duffey visits the Pelican Press. He discovers his friends are caught up in the Great Day madness, tearing down the office walls with axes and preparing to shed their skins. They show Duffey that these worldwide events match a comic article he wrote for their magazine a year prior, which ended with the warning: “If ever the world forgets to laugh, these things and others will come to pass.” Duffey declines their invitation to take his clothes off and leaves to check on St. Michael’s Church. He finds the building being unstructured by a congregation using new jargon. At the same time, a living stone statue of St. Michael complains that “the Unfaithful Assembled will not notice any difference” and wishes for a way “to put a good double edge on a stone sword.” Duffey goes to a local bar but finds that it serves only a drink called “The New Day Dawner.” Outside, he watches the city’s inhabitants merge witlessly into large, rolling spheres of flesh, losing their individual forms entirely. He sits on a bench in Jackson Square and speaks with Morpheus, the god of sleep, who explains that the universe is the dream of a single-celled organism and that “A waking world would be a shapeless and formless monstrosity.” Morpheus reveals that the eons-long dream is now shrinking back to its beginning and that they will “end as two submicroscopic snakes . . . and then one of us must swallow the other.” Duffey and Morpheus wrestle until they collapse in on themselves, shrinking into a single-cell creature swallowing itself, like a snake choking on another snake. To see what Lafferty does to Teilhard, one need only turn Teilhard’s diagram upside down. Teilhard imagines an upward movement of differentiation into unity; Lafferty parodies it as a downward movement of dissolution into enclosed monadic imprisonment. This diagram is what I think happens in "Great Day in the Morning." It is the engine block. It is not exactly what I have called counterfiguration. Only a hardcore Lafferty fan would care about it. It is much closer to Lafferty's old trick of thinking about how to reverse trajectories. He taught readers to look for this signature when he wrote "How I Wrote 'Continued on Next Rock'": How did I write “Continued on Next Rock” then? Upside down and backwards, HOW I WROTE CONTINUED ON NEXT ROCK of course. I started with a simple, but I believe novel, idea that had to do with time. Then I involuted the idea of time (making all things contemporary or at least repeating), and I turned the systems of values backwards, trying to make the repulsive things appear poetic (“the nobility of badgers, the serenity of toads”) and trying to set anti-love up as comparable to love (the flattest thing you can imagine has to have at least two sides; it can have many more). If you see the flip of Teilhard, you see what Lafferty is doing in giving the reader an "upside down," but it leaves open why he is doing it. This second issue is a much longer question than the first, and I can only make a few glancing points here. First, as should be obvious, Teilhard himself is careful to say that he thinks union differentiates, yet Lafferty rejects that premise in lampooning him. Lafferty might seem to set up a straw man because he refuses to grant Teilhard’s insistent claim that “union differentiates.” In short, Teilhard wants to act as if he preserves the boundaries that make sacramentality possible. If Lafferty had granted Teilhard this theory of differentiation, his own story could not have taken place: the barriers would not have been broken down but would have become more perfectly, more completely, themselves. We would have superior coffee cups. The sea would have a more perfectly differentiated shore. The clocks would have more perfectly differentiated hands. The wine would have its differentiated-yet-in-union glass. All coffee cups, shores, minute hands, and wine glasses would be even more highly differentiated than the ones we now know. Complexification would occur, and, with it, the deepening of identity in difference. The "Within" of the coffee cups, shores, clock hands, and wine glasses would be more profoundly interiorized. Teilhard’s “science fiction” depends on this idea that greater complexity brings greater consciousness; yet Lafferty's Great Day is about the obliteration of barriers that enable identity. He thinks something has gone wrong on each side of the differentiation-and-unification equation. Dietrich von Hildebrand is helpful here. Lafferty may well have read him. Even if he did not, he and Lafferty make for an illuminating parallel critique. They square with each other as orthodox intellectual Catholics responding to Teilhard. Von Hildebrand makes many points relevant to “Great Day in the Morning” and the destruction of the Pelican Press, but the most important is that the Catholic ekklesia, understood as corpus mysticum and koinonia, presupposes distinct, free, and irreducible spiritual persons. Teilhard smuggles monism in through the back door of eschatology. Both von Hildebrand and Lafferty think that Teilhard’s “collective consciousness” and “totalization” threaten to replace communion in love with absorption into an impersonal whole. In Lafferty, this threat takes concrete form in the disappearance of walls, containers, names, clothes, skins, minds, and personal boundaries. No one becomes more differentiated or more intensely personal on the Great Day. Instead, they become “blank” and “witless.” In the end, they become indistinguishable masses of “people-substance” minus substantial form. The story thus gives concrete form to von Hildebrand’s view that a fusion built on material processes alone cannot create spiritual communion. Like von Hildebrand, Lafferty thinks that Teilhard, despite what he says about the Within and the Without, his versions of the spiritual and the physical, confuses matter and spirit, nature and grace, cosmic energy and personal love, technological progress and sanctity, and earthly development and transcendent salvation. His system is, in the language of von Hildebrand’s famous title, a Trojan horse. More precisely, Teilhard functionally immanentizes salvation by binding Christogenesis too closely to cosmogenesis. For readers unfamiliar with Teilhard, Duffey’s wrestling match with Morpheus at the end of the story will seem strange, especially the meaning of the false etymology that connects dream to shape. Readers of The Phenomenon of Man, however, will recognize its sources, though I won't labor to show that. You will just have to read it if you haven't. Towards the end of that work, Teilhard writes, “Among those who have attempted to read this book to the end, many will close it, dissatisfied and thoughtful, wondering whether I have been leading them through facts, through metaphysics or through dreams.” Lafferty connects this to Teilhard’s obsessive use of metamorphosis and words formed from morph-, which occur dozens of times in Teilhard’s work. For Teilhard, metamorphosis denotes a change of evolutionary state. When life crosses the threshold of “reflection,” inherited animal powers such as perception, aggression, love, invention, and social behavior continue, but consciousness gives them a new dimension. The result is, in Teilhard’s phrase, “discontinuity superimposed upon continuity.” The Neolithic metamorphosis is the collective form of this change, what he calls the deployment of the noosphere. Agriculture, settlement, population growth, and accumulated knowledge transform scattered human groups into an increasingly connected noosphere. Endomorphosis provides the corresponding geological metaphor. Just as rocks alter one another internally through contact, peoples and cultures transform one another through migration, exchange, intermarriage, conflict, conquest, and assimilation. Even a conquered or partially absorbed people modifies its conquerors. Metamorphosis is therefore a master category in Teilhard’s thought. Through metamorphosis, humanity passes into a new mode of existence. Endomorphosis names the reciprocal inward transformation through which distinct human branches enter that common development. Together, the terms are supposed to explain noogenesis, the process by which human differences interpenetrate, reshape one another, and become incorporated into an increasingly unified planetary consciousness. This is what Lafferty calls eschatological science fiction and mocks. Lafferty rejects every form of evolutionary human speciation. For him, noogenesis is an idolatrous fantasy closed to transcendence, figured by the single cell as a prison house. Why, finally, does the story take place in the morning? I can't prove it, but I have a suggestion. The answer to that question might lie in one of Teilhard’s most important works, one that anyone who reads much of him would quickly come across, “The Mass on the World,” written at Ordos in 1923. Like "Great Day in the Morning," it is set at dawn. Lafferty's Great Day reads as a response to Teilhard’s purple meditation. To state the obvious, Genesis 14:18 associates Melchizedek with an offering of bread and wine, while Hebrews 5–7 identifies Christ’s priesthood with the order of Melchizedek. Teilhard begins without bread, wine, or altar and makes the whole earth his altar. I imagine Lafferty saw this as Teilhard taking it upon himself to rewrite the Mass by projecting it on a cosmic scale. In any case, Teilhard makes the whole earth his altar and offers God labor, suffering, growth, decline, and death of creation. In Lafferty’s parody, this cosmic extension becomes the claim that skins, barriers, and boundaries are unnecessary. Teilhard asks the divine Word to pronounce “This is my Body” over the forces that bring life and increase, and “This is my Blood” over those that bring dissolution and death. The Eucharistic pattern thus encompasses the whole course of cosmic becoming, as though all creation were evolving into Christ and the Incarnation could attain its fullness only at the Omega Point. In “Great Day in the Morning,” Omega becomes “Point Edhead,” the pointed head of a dunce or intellectual, with an echo of "egghead." At St. Michael’s, however, no Mass is held that morning. The church is “unstructured,” and the zodiac, the sun, and the moon replace the Stations of the Cross. At this point, Teilhard himself enters the story. He appears on the altar as “the holy demiurge,” flanked by McLuhan and McGonigal and “transfigured with light.” In place of the words of the actual consecration, he recites a pseudo-Teilhardian litany: “Peduncle, peduncle, Point Edhead, cosmogenization, valorization, obfuscation” and “Peduncle, neo-anthropocentrism, corpusculization, nookonos, peduncle.” The “Unfaithful Assembled” answer, “Great Day.” Lafferty converts the cosmic Mass into mere physical mass. The people remove their skins, surrender their minds and boundaries, “interiorize” themselves, and merge first into “great balls of people-substance,” then into “one big fleshy sphere,” and finally into a single cell swallowing itself. Teilhard’s cosmic Mass is travestied. We are far from the Omega Point and the differentiated Body promised by Christogenesis. Much else ought to be said about Lafferty’s use of Scripture in the story, particularly about the problem of world destruction and the old wine and the wineskin. I think “Great Day in the Morning” is Lafferty’s clearest look at what it meant for him to insist both on continuity with the past and on the need to inhabit a new world. Duffey is the old wine that is better than new wine, but he is also the old wineskin that the new wine will burst. The Great Day is what happens when there is no Day After the World Ended because what I have elsewhere called world-transcending elements have not been transmitted. These are the elements of any world bound to what Lafferty called the central fact of every possible historical world: the Incarnation. The Incarnation occurred in our past, but Christogenesis muddies it by making it a biological telos of evolution. “Great Day in the Morning” is a very rich story, with many Easter eggs. For example, the “Bitter End” at the end of the story is a Lafferty joke about anchors, tying back to The Bark as a figure of the Church and to the name of the Pelican Press publication. Not knowing this misses the story's point of being about the Argo, which is the Church Militant as a ship in the world: “Ah me,” Melchisedech said. “I had always regarded the Pelican as a refuge, as an anchor to hold fast in the great storms of the world.” “Both the sea ships and the river boats are cutting loose their anchors and letting them sink forever,” Zabotski said. “With faith, who needs anchors?” This Bitter End is the rope being cut to the Navicula Petri. At some point, this post will have a second part. For now, I’ll end with a pseudo-conclusion about poor Marshall McLuhan, who in 1967 had a brain tumor the size of a lemon removed. A real conclusion would have to take up the story’s positive theology, and that would make this post twice as long. I justify this detour through McLuhan because “Great Day in the Morning” is about the turmoil after Vatican II, when people were looking for answers and turning to figures like Teilhard or gurus like McLuhan. I began this post wanting to write about all the wild things Lafferty does with Scripture in the story, but Teilhard took over. So let’s just end with Marshall McLuhan, whose star was already fading when Lafferty wrote the story. The brain tumor had been removed, and he was not the same overly-aggitated dynamo he had been leading up to the operation. Let it be known that I have a soft spot for McLuhan. Many of his quirks have long seemed to me tied to his health, which is one reason Lafferty’s caricature of him seems unfair in hindsight. Yet Lafferty was not wrong to detect Teilhard’s influence on McLuhan, even if he went too far both in his comic reworking of the Transfiguration at St. Michael’s and in his trash-talking of McLuhan’s own faith. In cozy terms, Teilhard was a heretic, but McLuhan was an excessively voluble monologist and brilliant flibbertigibbet. Something complicated is going on among these three minds: Teilhard, McLuhan, and Lafferty. One could have a lot of fun digging into it. Near the end of his life, Tom Wolfe made a big deal of Teilhard’s influence on McLuhan’s account of the Electric Age as a version of the noosphere. This was after Wired magazine beautified McLuhan, and Wolfe was being somewhat opportunistic. WIRED MAGAZINE January 1996 Wolfe’s simplifying account has never seemed quite right to me, though I am not the person to work out the details. What I do know is that it is too simple. Nor was the connection itself new. Several years before Lafferty wrote “Great Day in the Morning,” it was already on people’s radar: someone had even written a dissertation in 1969 on Teilhard’s influence on McLuhan. (I read it and it is, unfortunately, not good.) Lafferty had a good nose, though, and somehow he caught the chemical scent of Teilhard’s noosphere on McLuhan’s Electric Age. And yet some modicum of intellectual influence is not religious identity, and because McLuhan himself tended to downplay both his conservatism and his Catholicism in his work and public appearances, it was difficult to discern where he really stood as a Catholic. Lafferty saw McLuhan and recoiled. Whatever McLuhan’s contradictions, he was more old-fashioned than Lafferty knew. He said, “I am resolutely opposed to all innovation, all change, but I am determined to understand what’s happening . . . Many people seem to think that if you talk about something recent, you’re in favor of it. The exact opposite is true in my case.” This puts him on team Duffey. Old wine versus new wineskins. Marshall McLuhan How amusing, then, that McLuhan, a temperamental conservative like Lafferty, should have ended up in Lafferty’s crosshairs. McLuhan drew heavily on the rightist ideas of Wyndham Lewis, was a daily communicant, and was deeply angered by the vernacular Mass after Vatican II, just as Lafferty was. In many ways, McLuhan’s Catholicism resembles Lafferty’s and stands far apart from what Lafferty regarded as Teilhard’s creation of a new religion. Teilhard, of course, denied that his was a new religion. In Let Me Explain, he pleaded, “It is still Christianity, I repeat, and Christianity it will always be: but it is a re-born Christianity” (105). That “but” should set off alarms. The irony is that Lafferty could hardly have known how much religious ground he shared with Marshall McLuhan or how far McLuhan disagreed with key Teilhardian notions. Lafferty’s own experiments with media put him in the same orbit as McLuhan. And both men were Chesterton obsessives. In a way, McLuhan did to Teilhard what Marx claimed to have done to Hegel: he set him right side up. The full picture of McLuhan’s Catholicism became clear only with the publication of his letters in the 1980s. Those letters reveal, for instance, that McLuhan regarded the introduction of the microphone into the Mass as disastrous. A microphone at Mass is just the kind of thing Lafferty would have put on Astrobe. Lafferty and McLuhan have far more in common than either does with Teilhard de Chardin. For anyone interested in the real McLuhan, there is only one good book: Grant N. Havers’s recent The Medium Is Still the Message, a book that finally gets McLuhan right.

Once I was crossing the Neva in a boat with my friend A., with whom, before this and later, I had many conversations on the subjects touched on in this book. We had been talking, but approaching the fortress we both fell silent, looking at the walls and probably thinking more or less the same thoughts. “There are factory chimneys too!” said A. And indeed from behind the fortress there rose brick chimneys with smoke-blackened tops. And suddenly, as he said it, I had an incredibly vivid sensation of the difference between factory chimneys and prison walls, a sensation that was like a blow or an electric shock. I sensed the difference of the very bricks. And it seemed to me that A. had the same sensation. Later, in a conversation with A., I recalled this episode, and he told me that not only then, but always he had sensed this difference and was deeply convinced of its reality. “Only positivism is convinced that a stone is a stone and nothing more,” he said. “But any uneducated woman or a child knows quite well that a stone from the wall of a church or a stone from the wall of a prison are different things.” Thus it seems to me that, in examining a given phenomenon in connection with all the chains of consequences of which it is a link, we shall find that the subjective sensation of the differences between two physically identical objects, which we often regard as mere poetic imagery, a metaphor, the reality of which we deny—is entirely real; we shall see that these objects actually are different, as different as a candle and a coin which look like identical circles, moving lines, in the two-dimensional world of plane-beings. We shall then see that objects identical as regards the material of which they consist, but different as regards their functions, are really different, and that this difference goes so deep that it even makes the seemingly identical material physically different. There are DIFFERENT STONES, DIFFERENT IRON, DIFFERENT WOOD, DIFFERENT PAPER. No chemistry will ever detect this difference. Nevertheless it exists, and there are people who feel and understand it. The mast of a ship, a gallows, a cross at the cross-roads in the steppe may be made of the same kind of wood, but in reality they are different objects made of different material. That which we see, touch, investigate are only the “circles on the plane” made by the coin and the candle. They are nothing but the shadows of real things, the essence of which lies in their function. The shadows of a sailor, a hangman and a saint may be completely identical—it is impossible to distinguish them by their shadows just as it is impossible to distinguish the wood of the mast, the gallows and the cross by chemical analysis. Nevertheless they are different men and different objects—it is only the shadows that are equal and alike. — P. D. Ouspensky, Tertium Organum: The Third Canon of Thought, A Key to the Enigmas of the World Poor Thundercolt’s Youth will just have to take its chances. It’s a question of communicating, and that’s shot for me. All those new Splendid Gadgets of persons — are you splendid enough yourself? — they don’t understand me, and I don’t understand them. ‘What are you trying to do, warn us that we’re already here?’ one of them asked me. ‘But we know we’re already here. No, no, there’s nobody else to warn. There is no body here but us. The people are all gone.’ I never did like the people that much anyhow. But they would have understood the piece, if I had done it before they were extinguished. — Letter to Sheryl Smith. First, the plot. Melchisedech Duffey, Absalom Stein, and Zabotski wake to a surprise: reality is being aggressively overwritten by a new and euphoric species. Calling themselves the “Royal Pop Historians,” or the “Thunder Harps,” these self-described “splendid people” commandeer Duffey’s New Orleans art gallery and pawnshop so they can host a convention devoted to pruning away the weeds of the old world. Soon, long-standing buildings are instantaneously replaced by pristine, stylized parks, while old people and animals, upon dying, dissolve: “Oh, the people and animals are mostly papier-mâché or rubber or styrofoam or plastic; after they break up and die, that's what's left of them. But some of them were pretty lively before the end.” It is a full ontological collapse of the old human era. Then comes the convention itself, where the new species explains its method for erasing human history. To them, that history is mostly a heap of malodorous fictions and psychological sicknesses. Speakers such as Cyrus Roundhead describe their metaphysical techniques, including the lifting of time-layered transparencies from stones, and use them to argue that the great sites of human civilization—Rome, Athens, the Black Sea, Jerusalem—were never real: “We commonly lift or peel off transparencies at six-second intervals. Each such transparency will give a detailed and accurate analysis of the air for its period . . . The patinas deposited on good rock surfaces can be lifted down to the thickness of a single molecule.” But a new timeline has to be enforced. The Royal Pops therefore lead a “safari” across the city, using “thunder axes” to butcher the remaining human “pseudopeople” and raze the old infrastructure. In place of the complex, passionate human inheritance, they install a superficial but expertly orchestrated aesthetic, emptied of empathy and depth. The metaphysical transition culminates in the kind of eschatological spectacle Lafferty loves. At the newly manifested Decatur Street Opera House, attendees are subjected to a kinetic test at the entrance. True humans are exposed by their passion: when they pass near basins of cold human ashes, the ashes burst into flame. Those so identified are separated out for execution: For there were ultimate tests set at the doorways, and it was known by kinetic intuition who must be tested... They were made to wash their hands in ashes, and they washed their hands in flame... They failed it in dirty flame and curling smoke. Inside the arena, the last defiant remnants of humanity—including Zabotski, the young artist Deutero-Finnegan, and Margaret Stone—are martyred by the Thunder Colt, the newly hatched and compulsively devouring totem of the superseding race. As the people of the old recension die, Roundhead admits that his new species lacks depth and inheritance. Yet he seems oblivious to the human legacy that he and the Splendids have annihilated. “We have the thunder dimension,” the talkative Cyrus Roundhead was saying in the loge, “but I am jealous that there may be other dimensions that we lack. Do we really miss anything by living so entirely on the surface? What we need to find for ourselves is a dimension of depth. It would be fine if some kind and older race would will such a dimension to us, but we look in vain for a source of any such inheritance.” To get into this story, I want first to bracket almost everything about it except one of Lafferty’s important source texts and the theological patchwork he uses to demolish it. In the early to mid-1970s, Lafferty began mining P. D. Ouspensky for ideas. The novel in which this influence is most visible is Not to Mention Camels. Apparently, Lafferty once told Robert Sirignano as much, though the exchange is not preserved in any of the Lafferty-to-Sirignano letters I have read. Ouspensky’s influence on Not to Mention Camels is oblique, often riffing on passages in the occultist’s work. At some point I’d like to explain how I think that works. But there is one Lafferty piece that is, at least on one level, an outright parody of Ouspensky, this one: From the Thunder Colt’s Mouth. It later became Chapter Eleven of More Than Melchisedech. Lafferty made a few important changes and many smaller touch-ups. Anyone who wants to understand the story needs to know something of this background. Pyotr Demianovich Ouspensky (1878–1947) was a Russian journalist and independent philosopher with a mathematical bent. He wrote Tertium Organum in Saint Petersburg in 1912, before his famous discipleship under Gurdjieff, his later break with the guru, and his final descent into what looks very much like spiritual fraud. He first reached the English-speaking world through the Bessaraboff–Bragdon translation of Tertium Organum in 1920. By the time he died, Ouspensky was a broken alcoholic who said that none of his ideas had led anywhere. The title Tertium Organum tells us a great deal about both his ambition and his pretension. It was meant to be a “third canon of thought,” standing after Aristotle’s Organon and Bacon’s Novum Organum. Ouspensky believed he had discovered a logic not of deduction or induction, but of direct intuitive perception of the real. There is a large amount of hogwash in the book, but I will try to give the main line of the argument fairly. Ouspensky attempts to extend human thought by combining Kant with C. H. Hinton’s speculations about higher-dimensional space. Ouspensky is a pillager of Kant who thinks that one can gain access to the “noumenal enough” by breaking down the Kantian wall of the first critique between the two formal features of the transcendental aesthetic. As in Kant, space and time are not treated as features of the world in itself, but as transcendenceal conditions or limitations of our receiving apparatus, though Ouspensky equivocates here. He says a non-rational animal perceives in fewer dimensions than we do, and it mistakes our solid world for surface and motion. We make a comparable error. We perceive a four-dimensional reality in three dimensions and mistake its higher extension for the flow of time. This is the crux. Correctly understood, past and future exist together in an eternal NOW, which our consciousness traverses like a traveler who supposes that the towns behind him have ceased to exist. In this scheme, both old-fashioned Kantian humility and positivism become versions of the animal condition raised into philosophy. Keep the eternal NOW in mind, because it stands at the center of Lafferty’s take down of Ouspensky. It is a comically simple version of block time. If there is an eternal NOW, why do we not perceive it? That is Ouspensky’s guiding question, and he has an answer, dear initiate into higher mysteries. There is, he says, a potential faculty called “cosmic consciousness.” Drawing on William James’s account of mystical experience and R. M. Bucke’s evolutionary mysticism, Ouspensky argues that a higher logic is reachable, one in which the part can equal the whole (he is unaware of Russell’s Paradox), and that a new higher man will arrive, leaving ordinary humanity in the dust, one who sees time as space: A higher race is rapidly arising from the bulk of humanity, and it is arising through its own peculiar, understanding of the world and of life. It will truly be a HIGHER RACE - and there will be no possibility of any falsification, any substitution, any usurpation. The men of this new consciousness will constitute a superior race, already born and living among us, recognizing one another by passwords and countersigns. Their entrance into the arena will be the judgment of old humanity. This is the part of Ouspensky that matters most for Lafferty. For Ouspensky, time is simply the fourth dimension of space, imperfectly perceived. Because our Kantian receiving apparatus—the forms of intuition described in the Transcendental Aesthetic—does not grasp the higher extension of bodies all at once, that extension reaches us not as a shape we see but as a succession we undergo. “Time” becomes the sensation of consciousness moving along a spatial direction it cannot apprehend whole, as a plane-being would experience a solid passing through its world as an event rather than an object. Yes: Ouspensky does not understand Kant. Ouspensky-ese To narrow in on what Lafferty is doing, it helps to set out his parody of Ouspensky on three levels. The first parody is metaphysical. It works by granting Ouspensky everything. The lecturer at Duffey’s teaches warmed-over Tertium Organum: “our time scale is purely conventional”; all events “are pretty much simultaneous”; there is no past, only “times and incidents that have been misplaced”; there is no future, only “a putative direction so designated by those who have really lost their directions.” This is Ouspensky’s eternal NOW, his misplaced railway station that “existed, is existing, and will exist.” Ouspensky writes: Those who came from Moscow to St Petersburg passed through Tver. They are no longer at that station, nevertheless it exists. In the same way, a moment which corresponded to some event, already past, as, for instance, to the birth of life on earth, has not disappeared but exists. It is not outlived by the universe, but only by the earth. The place of this event in a four-dimensional universe is defined by a certain point, and this point has existed, exists and will continue to exist. At present another wanderer is passing through it . . . Time does not flow, just as space does not flow. It is we that flow, wanderers in a four-dimensional universe. Lafferty draws a fun metaphysical inference. If nothing has ceased to happen, nothing is safely behind us, so everything can be screwed with through editing: “These are not ghosts of the past that we track down and set right. Really, there are no ghosts . . .There are certain times and incidents that have been misplaced. But we can find them . . . If a thing is not still happening, then how will it be revised?” A metaphysic built to guarantee the preservation of the past can become a warrant for editing it; and whatever can be edited can be obliterated. Here Lafferty’s fear of historical tampering comes into view. In the story, that fear reaches its greatest pitch when the Black Sea, Rome, Athens, and Jerusalem are removed from history. The epigraph’s question (“how can it be uncreated again?”) is crucial here. Lafferty takes it from material quoted by Ouspensky in Tertium Quid. In its original context, the line belongs to a strain of Hindu thought in which “phenomenal reality” is “destruction” because it draws the soul away from the noumenal, undifferentiated One. The phenomenal becomes real by returning to its transcendental source. Lafferty travesties this idea through the Splendid People and their thunder axes. For him, this is not the restoration of the real. It is metaphysical vandalism. The second level of parody is anthropological. Ouspensky closes Tertium Organum by saying that “the future belongs not to man, but to superman, who is already born, and lives among us”; that among these transitional men “already are established pass-words and counter-signs”; and that the age’s great questions “may be solved by the entrance into the arena of a new race CONSCIOUS OF ITSELF which will judge the old races.” Lafferty has enormous fun with this. The Splendids have awakened “only the other day” and already possess the world. The passwords have become convention buttons: “Are You Splendid Enough?” As so often, Lafferty seizes on one word in a source text and inflates it into theater. Here the word is “arena.” In “From the Thunder Colt’s Mouth,” the anthropological drama culminates in Christians being fed to the lions. The judgment of the old races is conducted in an actual arena, with bulls, bears, the Thunder Colt Game, and the last humans thrown to the totems. The scene was a blood-and-sand arena. The act was a bullfight . . . Each of the young persons would defy a bull and do a flying handstand on its horns. Then there would be an interval when the bull was given a human person to mangle to death. The humans were sliced and gored by the curving, whetted horns . . . In the third aspect of parody, one sees Lafferty’s real brilliance because it condemns the superman by using Ouspensky. Tertium Organum gives two tests of the higher man, and the splendids fail both of them. Ouspensky's criterion for his two races is the "ability to create or ability only to destroy.” He says that the lower type are like apes loose with a man's tools. Imagine a zoo full of apes. A man is working in the zoo. The apes observe his movements and try to imitate him... if the apes manage to get out of the cage and get hold of the man's tools, they may destroy all the work of this man and do a lot of harm to themselves. But they will never be able to create anything . . . Creation and destruction - or rather ability to create or ability only to destroy - are the two main signs of the two types or two races of man. Spoilers. That is, of course, what the Splendids are. They confess that “we don’t have much detailed history of our own . . . but we can steal some of their things and their memories.” They “search vainly for a legacy of glory” and end the story under an unlegacied sky: apes with thunder axes. Ouspensky’s figure for the lower perceiver (the being who mistakes surface and animated motion for reality, who shies because “the bush has suddenly turned round”) is the horse. This is where Lafferty gets the title of the story. Ouspensky calls the condition “two-dimensionality.” Lafferty turns the scheme back on him. It is the Splendid People who are “entirely and splendidly on the surface,” living in a world of animated effigies and deflating buildings, a world that hatches its totem colt on human flesh. Ouspensky’s lowly two-dimensionsal horse has become Lafferty’s version of a golden calf. Much more could be said about Lafferty’s use of Ouspensky here. He takes from him, for instance, the idea that stones contain history. But enough is now visible to show that Lafferty is not simply making things up out of whole cloth. He begins with ideas in Ouspensky—the eternal NOW, stones as recording devices, horses as two-dimensional perceivers, lower and higher men, and gives them the Lafferty treatment. So far, the critique has been entirely negative. Lafferty’s positive position appears in the way he uses his own tradition to set out a counter-vision. For symmetry’s sake, I will break this down into three points as well. The first thing Scripture does in the Thunder Colt texts is blow the whistle. This is another of Lafferty’s counterfeit worlds. The Splendids have built an entire identity out of stolen Scripture, though Lafferty expects the reader to notice this without being told. The psalm that mentions Melchisedech is also the psalm the Splendids plunder: Psalm 109 in the Vulgate numbering. More specifically, the phrase comes from the lines before the Melchisedech verse: in splendoribus sanctorum, “in the brightness of the saints.” Duffey half-remembers it as a phrase “used by the Lord Himself for an earlier mob,” and one sentence later the text gives us “the Splendid People.” The Splendids have stolen Duffey’s own coronation song, just as they have stolen his house. Their harvest imagery is stolen too. All the business of weed-cutting, flesh-weeds, and “one will be taken and one will be left” travesties Matthew’s parable of the wheat and the tares. This time the cockle conducts the reaping, burns the good wheat, and lays claim to the shining that the parable’s last verse reserves for the just: “Then shall the just shine as the sun in the kingdom of their Father.” Who are these reapers of the wheat? Just who we would expect. When asked, they say their name is Legion. “And what did you say was the name of your society?” Stein asked. “I also forget.” “Legion,” the Countess said. That was the answer to both their questions. The second element in Lafferty’s counter-vision is an ontology of remembrance set against the metaphysics of unhappening. The Splendids’ world is one in which the unremembered “never existed.” They destroy the Black Sea because of its connection to the Argo mythos and Colchis, and this act belongs to their larger campaign of militant amnesia. Against this, Lafferty sets the biblical conviction that nothing offered to God is finally lost. The proclamation in “the new style of writing,” whose words will not stand fast, is nailed over the Fourth Gospel (In principio erat Verbum) so that the war on verbatimness is waged directly over the Word. Duffey’s squid ink, which “will remain true” after three thousand years, becomes the scribal figure of Christ’s promise: “heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.” This pattern of iconographic insetting repeats throughout the story. The ashes at the opera doors kindle because “there was something that remembered.” This is Abel’s blood crying from the earth; it is also the Ash Wednesday memento. Zabotski, who is always a Noah figure in Lafferty, bellows once more after death, leaving the “human-stenchy” wake. “I'll leave me a wake, you!” Zabotski roared . . . “I will strew me a path in this world and out of the door of this world! I will make me remembered!” . . . He did, however, give one more defiant bellow after he was dead, a thing that startled the spectators... But he left a stenchy wake from the smell of his burned and burst-open hands — human-stenchy. Why is Roundhead called Roundhead? Because the Roundheads wanted to decapitate a king, and this is a story of an assault on God. The story first appeared in Roger Elwood’s anthology In the Wake of Man, and I wonder whether Lafferty knew the title before he wrote it, since he builds the idea of the wake so deeply into the text. Zabotski’s wake clearly alludes to “the human ship will be the one that left no wake,” from Wisdom 5:10, where the wicked lament that their lives passed “as a ship . . . whereof when it is gone by, the trace cannot be found.” In fact, the Book of Wisdom supplies the hidden script of the whole arena: the plot to “examine him by outrages and tortures,” the gold proved in the furnace, the wicked standing amazed that the just are “numbered among the saints.” The extermination the Splendids stage as triumph has already been judged from within Wisdom itself. Lafferty expects the reader to know these famous chapters. Finally, there is the basic biblical furniture. Against the people without passion stand the biblical vocations: Melchisedech the priest-king, offering his comic bread and wine (here doughnuts and Green Ladies, with the promise that “somehow you will all be taken care of”) while the Roman Canon’s own high priest goes unrecognized by his guests; Mary Virginia carrying the killed child on her bosom as the story’s Pietà; and Margaret, margarita, the Pearl of Great Price, whom the barnacle-scrapers destroy. Her nightly “giving-of-testimony” is martyria. Her ordeal gathers up the Bible’s theology of fire: Elijah’s contest, where the God who answers by true flame is God; Daniel’s furnace, where the flame does not consume; Pentecost, where fire rests on the tongue. The Splendids use fire to detect and destroy humans. Lafferty, as he so often does, uses fire to anneal, judge, and vindicate. The story ends with the smallest possible unit of vindication: the laugh the Thunder Colt “couldn’t go deeply enough to get.” That is Psalm 2. The nations rage, the kings take counsel together, and he who dwells in heaven laughs at them. The Thunder Colt wheeled back and killed Margaret Stone at a single pass. It tore off half of her head with its totemic teeth; it tore out her throat. But it couldn't go deeply enough to get the laugh in her throat. That's all she had to leave. If you haven’t read or thought much about how From the Thunder Colt’s Mouth works, this should get you started. It becomes a far more complicated piece when taken as the Fifth Road in the Seven Contingencies in the Argo legend, so I’m going to leave it here for now, though some notes are included below. Songs of the Average Man, Sam Walter Foss (1907). Impossible to prove, but I would not be surprised if Lafferty had this poem in the back of his mind.

I wish to argue here that the recurring pattern of descent and ascent, expressed mythically as katabasis and anabasis, and metaphysically in Neoplatonism as proodos and epistrophe, is not only a formal analogy to Christian theology. Rather, it is decisively reconfigured and fulfilled in the doctrines of kenosis and theosis. In Christianity, this pattern ceases to be merely narrative or purely metaphysical. It becomes Christological and participatory, thereby deepening and fulfilling the soteriological promise latent in all earlier cycles of descent and ascent. — "Descent and Ascent as Theological Grammar: From Katabasis to Kenosis, From Anabasis to Theosis" The sacrifice of the Father’s love consists in self-renunciation and in self-emptying in the begetting of the Son. The sacrifice of the Son’s love consists in self-depletion in the begottenness from the Father, in acceptance of birth as begottenness . . . . The sacrifice of love, in reality, is pre-eternal suffering—not the suffering of limitation which is incompatible with the absoluteness of the divine life but the suffering of the authenticity of sacrifice and of its immensity. This suffering of sacrifice not only does not contradict the Divine all-blessedness but, on the contrary, is its foundation, for this all-blessedness would be empty and unreal if it were not based on authentic sacrifice, on the reality of suffering. — Sergius Bulgakov Advanced Lafferty. I hope this doesn’t come across as needlessly hard in the paint. Over the last few months, I have thought about Gregorio Montejo’s Balthasarian-inflected reading of Lafferty and where I argue with it. To show my cards, my thinking belongs to a different Catholic tradition, one informed by contemporary Thomism and my favorite contemporary theologian, Thomas Joseph White, O.P. Without White’s work, I could not have written this post. At the same time, Balthasar and Von Speyr have long fascinated me. Balthasar has long been part of my devotional reading, not least because I believe that beauty is one of the transcendentals, and Balthasar is a genius on this topic. One of the wonderful aspects of Catholic theology is that there are different schools. But I don't subscribe to Holy Saturday theology, and because East of Laughter is a book with a Christological focus, one must think through its theological ideas to arrive at its center: a laughing God conveyed through an aesthetic object, a wild book written by an eccentric Okie. Today, I want to sketch some theological stakes and look at two schools, with a focus on the Thomistic case. Those who are not interested in the details of Christology will find little here to pique their interest. There is no way to write this post without theological jargon that could be alienating. Yet the language is worth knowing. As P. F. Strawson once said, "There is no such thing as elementary philosophy." Sometimes jargon just is unavoidable terminology. Beyond the inherited language, by the end, I want to make a strong argument for what means to hear the shockwave of Christ’s laugh. That is what interests me because it intrigued Lafferty. Keep an eye on this: a laughing Christ. A while back, Montejo wrote an essay that endorses ("deep continuity") Sergei Bulgakov's elevation of kenotic self-emptying to "the basic, unifying idea for theology," with kenosis reaching "from creation to eschatology" so that "the Son's kenosis permeates the entire economy of creation and salvation." Bulgakov (1871–1944) was a Russian Orthodox priest, philosopher, theologian, and former economist. His chief idea was sophiology: the claim that Sophia, or Divine Wisdom, helps explain how God can be wholly beyond the world and yet present within creation. Bulgakov’s biography is fascinating. He put aside his early interest in Marxism because he believed that social change without spiritual transformation could not meet humanity’s needs. His mature theology emphasized the goodness and transfiguration of creation, but it was controversial in Orthodox circles because critics thought it blurred the line between God and the world. That is part of what this post is about. I think those early Orthodox critics were right. Moreover, Bulgakov was a critic of Roman Catholic dogma, and it is on dogmatic grounds that he will jar against Laffery. Montejo’s argument runs something like this. Descent-ascent is a metaphysical grammar across myth, philosophy, and Christian theology. Christianity has this grammar but radically personalizes and historicizes it in Christ where divine descent is no longer cosmic procession or heroic katabasis. It is God’s free self-emptying into flesh, death, and abandonment; human ascent is no longer just a return to original but deifying participation in divine life. This kind of argument will be familiar from C. S. Lewis’s “Myth Became Fact”/True Myth idea. Long before that it was Eusebius and praeparatio evangelica. It gets a lot right. On a reading governed by the divine missions (the economics of salvation), I grant much of what Montejo’s essay says. The souls be measured carefully. Bulgakov’s doctrine of kenosis complicates the entire question. To be clear, by kenosis I will mean only Christ’s self-emptying humility: the eternal Son’s free descent into human body and soul, obedience, suffering, and death, without ceasing to be divine. Bulgakov makes kenosis a feature of the immanent Trinity, an eternal sacrifice constitutive of the divine life, so that for him Christ's kenosis reveals what God eternally is. This view is far more comprehensive than saying kenosis is something the Son does in the assumed humanity. My view is that Bulgakov does much more than make kenosis pervasive in the economy of salvation. He writes kenosis unacceptably into the inner life of the Trinity. I do not believe any form of kenosis as usually understood can belong to the immanent Trinity (the subsistent relations by which the divine persons are distinguished based on relations of origin only, to put it in Thomistic language) without making self-emptying constitutive of God’s being. That, in turn, runs counter to classical Christology. A simple formula may clarify the point: Christ’s human nature does not belong to the immanent Trinity; kenosis per se is intelligible only through the Son’s assumption of humanity, which is what Paul means when he writes about it in Philippians 2: 6-8. No surprise, then, that I would see a real departure from classical Christian theism, this whole placing of even an “analogical” kenosis within the relations of the divine persons. My claim will be old-fashioned. I read Lafferty through a Chalcedonian and dyothelite Christology, as does Montejo. By Chalcedonian, I mean that Christ is one divine person in two natures, divine and human, without confusion, change, division, or separation; by dyothelite, I mean that this one person with two natures possesses both a divine will and an assumed human will. To cash this out, I read Freddy Foley’s symbolic descent and ascent in Fourth Mansions as a gratuitous participation in grace, not analogous to the Father's eternal relation to the Son, not an analogy for the filiative process within the Godhead, not as True Myth relative to the relations of the Trinity. Lafferty once said that myth is a way to get at the truth. He did not think of divine revelation itself as being myth but as divine truth, which Montejo, I believe, would acknowledge. Myth gets at truth but revelation just is truth. Lafferty’s Christology seems to present this view. Christ, he said, is the Lord of the Archetypes. Lafferty did not say that Christ is an archetype for the obvious reason he thought Christ was a real person, one with two natures and two wills, no myth about it. His view on this is clearest in From the Thunder Colt’s Mouth where the incarnation is a stubborn fact the Splendid People can’t manipulate. Christ’s laughter in East of Laughter belongs to the same old-fashioned Christology. Like Christ’s human kenosis, the dynamic belongs to the Son’s assumed human nature rather than to the divine nature. This is related to, but distinct from, my antecedent objection, namely that I think one should be reluctant to install any form of analogical sacrifice (even one of non-loss) inside the immanent Trinity. This may seem like splitting hairs, yet it bears on Freddy’s participation in the mission of the Son, on the character of Lafferty’s Catholic art, and on Freddy's own theosis. After all, a theologically literate reader will want to ask some hard questions. What is Freddy’s kenosis in the Bug, that is, what does his literary symbolic emtombment and ascension amount to? In what sense is Freddy’s abasement analogous to the historical/temporal kenosis of Christ? Does kenosis reach into the immanent Trinity through an analogy of the Father’s relation to the Son? How does human laughter relate to the laughter of the Laughing Christ and the two natures and the two wills of Christ? Answering these questions will be conditioned by how one conceptualizes the whole problematic of descent and ascent within the Christian world picture. We want to keep the idea of descent-ascent front and center, which is the topic of Montejo’s essay. Let’s start conservatively. Kenosis pervades the economy of creation and salvation, predicated of the Son in his divinity (all things created through the Word) and his assumed humanity (his death on the Cross). That is not heterodox. What I would not want to grant is kenosis as the basic, unifying idea of theologia as such if by theologia we mean the internal relations of the divine persons. Following Aquinas, the subject, unifying principle, and formal object of theologia are God as the Holy Trinity, not a single dynamic motif. To crown kenosis as that principle, I think, conflates the subsistent relations of the eternal Trinity with the economy in the temporal order of created nature and salvation history. This can be simply stated. The sacred economy is not a region inside the Godhead; rather, it is the unfolding in time of what God eternally and immutably is. By contrast, the economy is the temporally revelatory “presentation” of the eternal, not something the eternal and impassible Trinity undergoes. What enters time is the effect that humans experience within time: created term joined to an eternal procession. As St. Thomas argued a divine mission is an eternal procession with a created temporal effect added, so that the Son and the Spirit are sent without anything new accruing to the eternal persons. The missions, therefore, presuppose and reveal the processions of the inner life of the Trinity. Kenosis cannot in any way constitute the Trinity. The eternal processions ground the temporal missions, not the other way around. The relation of the Son in the immanent Trinity is the communication of the one undivided essence, entire and with nothing withheld, admitting neither before-and-after nor remainder nor passibility. To call that "emptying" or "sacrifice" is to add to the notional act of filiation. In short, it recasts a relation of origin as an eternal kenosis. As theology, the Bulgakov lineage of thought thus looks to me Hegelian and developmental, a bit like Bauer's “Third Testament,” which ranks Father, Son, and Spirit as stages, though proponents will deny this vigorously. It temporalizes the eternal relations of the immanent Trinity and calls it analogy and sacrifice without loss. Yet it introjects the “economic Trinity” into the “inner life,” because it adores suffering, then it makes kenosis a single dynamic enthroned as the engine of everything. We might recall the “false and premature mutation” that fails because the Harvesters “hadn't the holy simplicity for it.” The other simplicity I have in mind is the immanent Trinity as God. Many Thomists would reject the entire notion of an economic Trinity as more confused than explanatory but keep the idea of economy as being useful analytic language. I have zero qualms about that. Again, theologically, the problem is that a certain view of kenosis predicates self-emptying of the divine nature itself. The Bulgakovian model of kenosis describes God's own life rather than the assumed humanity (“divine self-limitation . . . ontologically united"). It amounts to what White has called "inverted monophysitism," because a God who is one in being and will has zero eternal surrender or self-emptying in the divine nature. It hypostatizes human attributes by univocity. Montejo's essay has a footnote that explains kenosis (the Son "took on what he did not have," with no loss of divinity), and that footnote settles the Christological case in the orthodox direction: the kenosis is predicated of the assumed humanity, not of the divine nature. Fair enough. The question is whether the essay's broader metaphysical view of kenosis and ambition stays consistent with its own footnote. This is all that slippery language about grammar and latency. The theological problem arises when metaphysical kenosis goes a step further and imports self-emptying into the subsistent relations of the Trinity. Inverted monophysitism is the Christological problem: it characterizes the divine nature by reference to human attributes; the eternal self-emptying of the Trinity is where it terminates. In Fourth Mansions, the Harvesters try to seize godhood by their own weird spiritual techniques through the self-mutation ritual, the wounds and injected serums. Then they reap monsters, a murdered member, and a demon they are playing with. Freddy's elevation at the end (“gifts, powers, lives, worlds”) is gratuitous, a grace the Patricks don’t receive, though they keep waiting to be called. To sharpen this up a little, consider how kenosis talk can too easily arrive at an economy-constitutes-God reading, though Montejo doesn't say this, and I wouldn't want to imply that he does. I do think, however, that the tradition Montejo uses to read Lafferty leans this way. That is just one man's view because one could extrapolate something like the following: "Paradigms of one another," kenosis and theosis as "a single reciprocal movement," and God "humanized for man . . . to that same extent" that man is divinized all get read constitutively, and then this drifts toward von Balthasar's Trinitarian enrichment. Against this is the view that the divine missions of the Trinity reveal the eternal God without constituting him. To his credit, Montejo himself grounds the reciprocity language in Maximus's love and says that deification "perfects rather than dissolves difference" and is "participation . . . in the inner life of the divine Godhead." Maximus is an edifying and brilliant Saint. I would object to calling descent-ascent the grammar of God, if "grammar" is taken comprehensively of the Trinity. Taken descriptively, the term is harmless. Taken constitutively, it subordinates the intratrinitarian mystery to a structure held latent in the natural and mythic order, when in truth their resemblance to descent-and-ascent is post factum and supernatural, known only in the light of revelation and derivable from no pattern, reason, or myth already possessed. This is the monomyth's mistake, and the Neoplatonist's before it: to make proodos and epistrophe the form the mysteries fill out. Montejo knows this. He calls the pattern "decisively reconfigured and fulfilled," not merely instanced, yet he locates a promise "latent in all earlier cycles." The pressure is on words such as latent and fulfilled. Reconfigured how? If latent is read back from the mysteries, supernatural and after the fact, and we are talking about cultural poetics that may be prepatory for the gospel, nothing is lost. If it names a promise already inscribed in the natural and mythic/poetic order, awaiting actualization, the mysteries are once more subordinated. Latent means hidden. The Holy Spirit, for instance, is latent or hidden in the I AM THAT I AM that Moses heard. Is Christ hidden in Orpheus or Dionysius in the same way? The word "grammar" might invite an inscribed reading, but a commitment to a strictly economic kenosis should rule it out: the Son takes on what he did not have, without change to the divine nature. Myth may prepare for the gospel, but how can it be a grammar the immanent mystery instances? This is why "reconfigure" is so ambiguous and needs to be spelled out. Does reconfigure mean reshaping a real pattern already latent in the natural and mythic order, or only reshaping how we read the old myths once the economy has happened? The test is typology. Christ fulfills Adam because Scripture itself presents him as the new Adam, a revealed type, intended within the economy. Christ does not fulfill Prometheus. Prometheus is not a latent or hidden fact about soteriological grammar. We may still allegorize Prometheus for what light it gives, provided we remember we are doing allegory and not handling real typology. This is the point where Montejo's grammatical idiom and his real commitments seem to pull apart. Ask yourself, is mythopoetic convergence necessary and sufficient for theological meaning? Here is where I think Montejo is right. Fourth Mansions dramatizes descent, burial, third-day emergence, and theosis as wholeness. The novel is clearly about Freddy’s ascent. It is just that Freddy’s ascent is gratuitous and cycle-breaking, a received ascent of the human who is the holy fool Freddy Foley, and of the human nature this holy fool shares with Christ. Yet once the ascent is placed there, Montejo’s governing mythopoetic figure of descent and ascent as “a single reciprocal movement” gives way. A reciprocal movement runs its variability on both sides at once: God humanized to the extent that man is divinized. Montejo's language is fine if read weakly as being about the asymmetrical reciprocity of love rather than as a metaphysical co-constitution of God and creature. Let’s work it through. In Christ, the side that ascends in the Ascension is the assumed humanity. Freddy is a creature with a human nature, and what happens to Freddy is the creature’s reception of grace. That grace is given by God and raises the creature toward him; the divine nature is its source and its term. The movement cannot be reciprocal, because the divine nature does not ascend alongside the creature. To make it reciprocal is to let glory be predicated of the divine nature in the same motion that it is received by the creature. What does this have to do with East of Laughter and its Christology? Well, it bears on the nature of Christological laughter through the same dyothelite grammar one finds in the kenosis dispute. The question there is not whether the word kenosis may be used but where it is predicated: is it a self-emptying of the divine nature itself (the Hegel–Bulgakov line, and Balthasar after them) or the divine person freely assuming a passible humanity, which then undergoes the conditions of the flesh it assumes? The traditional view holds the latter: the Son takes on "what he did not have" without loss of divinity. The act of emptying belongs to the human nature; what is lowly is the humanity freely assumed. Montejo's phrase "divine self-emptying" can be read as shorthand for the self-emptying of the divine Son in his assumed humanity, the orthodox sense. His larger idiom leaves it open to the stronger sense without quite committing to it. The question I have comes from his endorsement of Bulgakov's elevation of kenosis to "the basic, unifying idea for theology," reaching "from creation to eschatology": a kenosis made that universal is hard to keep confined to the assumed humanity. The own formulations are weaker than they look. When he unites "divine self-limitation" and creaturely ascent "vitally, ontologically," he places the union "in the fullness of time," when "God will be all in all," economic and eschatological, not immanent. And when he calls deification participation in "the self-giving love that is the inner life of the divine Godhead," what he locates in God is self-giving love, not self-emptying; self-giving love in the Godhead is traditional, the language of the processions. It tips toward the stronger reading if that love is equated with kenosis. The one part I myself would not lean on is the exclusion of loss in Trinitarian kenosis, because it does not help Montejo and may do the opposite. That Bulgakov calls self-diminution "foreign to creation" does not keep kenosis economic, since the objection is not to kenosis as loss but to kenosis as constitutive. A sacrifice purified of diminution is what Bulgakov affirms all the way up, as the "foundation" of the divine all-blessedness, and to found blessedness on sacrifice is to make it constitutive of the divine life, not to guard against it. If anything, clearing out diminution leaves standing the non-diminishing kenosis that a "no loss of divinity" footnote in the essay does not reach. So my criticism is not that his essay drives the phrase to the stronger meaning, but that by endorsing Bulgakov's elevation of kenosis to the unifying principle of theology, he leaves it unguarded, open to the immanent reading Bulgakov states outright, the one Montejo himself, elsewhere, takes pains to safeguard against. Bulgakov says the Father's "self-renunciation" and "self-emptying in the begetting of the Son" is a sacrifice he calls "pre-eternal." That is kenosis in the processions, not the economy. Sharpen this with the hardest thing in the Gospels, the cry of dereliction on the Cross. Does Christ's kenotic self-abasement mean he loses the beatifying effect of the vision of God on the Cross? Does his full vision of the essence of God go dark on the Cross? My view, which is White's, is that he did not lose the vision, because if he did, it would import the economy of salvation into the subsisting relations of the Trinity. The passion was suffered on the human side because the divine nature is eternal and impassible. As contemporary Thomists have pointed out, by a special dispensation, the joy of the beatific vision was confined to the higher reason and did not redound to the lower powers and the body. This is how Christ suffered and was desolate in the sensitive part of his being. It isn’t that he kept the vision and somehow suffered anyway. Instead, the vision's consolation was walled off from the powers where the suffering occurred. He retained the beatific vision, with its beatifying overflow suspended below. Now extend this thinking about the divine nature and its impassibility to laughter. Laughter would belong to Christ's human nature: it is a bodily expression (breath, voice, the convulsive motion) of a delight of the human soul, and both the cognitive trigger and the bodily discharge are human acts. The divine nature is bodiless and impassible. It cannot laugh in this sense, though the Old Testament speaks of God laughing in a manner I will qualify in a moment. Of course, Aristotle observed that man alone laughs (De Partibus Animalium III.10). After Porphyry, one part of the theological tradition made laughter the textbook proprium, proper to all and only humans. Laughter was thought to flow from rational animality while standing outside the definition. Laughter is part of the complete humanity the Son assumed, or at least it seems to me that Lafferty thought as much. By the communication of idioms, it is predicated of the person: one cannot say “the Godhead laughed,” yet one can say “the Son of God laughed.” There, the term names the person who laughs with a human mouth. So Christ's laughter is human in nature and filial in mode: the laughter of the Son, expressive of his divine identity, is not transposed onto the divine nature. In other words, kenosis and laughter are aspects of Christ’s human nature. Two riders, with the second taking us into East of Laughter. First, Psalm 2's “He who sits in the heavens laughs,” which East of Laughter quotes, is a metaphor. It depicts the Trinity’s serene, impassible sovereignty by its effect; it is not a passion in the Trinity. Second, and this is what makes laughter interesting: laughter sits on the side of joy, and joy is an “affect” with an analogue in the divine nature, the gaudium of ST I, q. 20, a. 1, joy in God as an act of will, not a passion. So Christological laughter is a doubled case. The act, the bodily laughing, is human, kept on the human side just as physical suffering is. But the delight it expresses, while a real joy of Christ's human soul, points analogically upward to something in the divine nature of God, which suffering does not do. Human nature remains human, without importing bodily passibility into the Godhead, even as the joy they express reaches toward the divine gaudium. Read this way, one keeps a human attribute on the human nature side of the line. The problem with contemporary kenotic theology is that it does flirt with imposing genuinely human attributes onto the divine nature, with kenosis as the name for that transposition. To be a little more precise, the Son assumes the passible human nature; the humility, obedience, suffering, death; laughter occurs according to that assumed humanity. The Son acts according to his perfect human nature. There is nothing like ascent or descent inside the immanent Trinity. The dyothelite grammar that keeps Christ’s dereliction on the Cross and prevents it from migrating into the impassible Godhead is, I think, the real constitutive grammar, because it is theological grammar, and because it does not impute kenosis or laughter to an impassible nature. It keeps Freddy's relation to divine grace and theosis in view, and it tells us something powerful about Lafferty’s Laughing Christ. It makes Lafferty’s imagination more incarnational, not less. In the end, these are not questions one settles apart from a whole way of understanding Christology. Outside the Creed, faithful readers may reason carefully and still part ways. Most readers won’t care one iota about understanding such matters. Ascent and descent will be poetic figures for them. They won’t give a tinker’s damn about the theological weirdness of Bulgakov’s invention of a kenosis of God the Father to the Son. I have given the reading of Christ's kenosis and laughter that I find fits best with Lafferty. Montejo may or may not have read Lafferty differently, but this is the kind of conversation I enjoy. From the perspective of the world, etc.

“I’m Marco Rixthaler,” the young man said. “I am the son of the eminent Melchior Rixthaler.” — Aurelia Thinking about Aurelia and her crash landing a few weeks ago put me in mind of one of Lafferty’s best translations, his version of a poem by Fernán Caballero, the pseudonym of Cecilia Böhl de Faber. She was one of the most important Spanish writers of the nineteenth century. Born in Switzerland, she became associated with Spain, especially Andalusia, whose customs, landscapes, and popular traditions show up throughout her work. Her best-known novel, La gaviota (The Seagull), helped develop the Spanish novel of customs and contributed to the movement toward realism in Spanish literature. The poem's rooster inevitably brings the shadow of Matthew 26:34. Readers of Aurelia will know the importance of horns.

There are persons with a strong interest and affection for themselves and themselves alone. There are persons with a strong interest and affection for the world about them, and for its furniture and people. So far as I know, these are the only two sorts of people there are, and the difference between these two sorts is very deep. It would seem that the persons of the first sort, having no real interest in other persons at all, would not be interesting to those other persons either; but this isn’t always the case. These persons of the first sort are often able to transmit their intoxication with themselves to others. —“The Case of the Moth-Eaten Magician” No, there won't be any more stories, longish, shortish, or otherwise, none, never, nowhere. If you need something to distinguish an autographed edition of something, I can give you globs of poetry to use (I never swore off writing poetry) but no more stories. — Letter Another gem in Lafferty’s Vogelsprachekund translations is François Villon’s “Ballade des menus propos.” Rabelais admired Villon and helped carry his comic, satirical, earthy, subversive medieval voice into the French Renaissance. Villon himself was a fifteenth-century French poet, born in Paris around 1431. Like Ambrose Bierce, he eventually disappears from the historical record; after 1463, we lose sight of him. Before that disappearance, he led a troubled life filled with poverty, prison, exile, and, always, conflict with the law. He is still one of the best-known poets of the French Middle Ages, chiefly for Le Lais and Le Testament. In “Ballade des menus propos,” Villon uses the fixed form of the ballade, with its closing address to a “Prince,” to make repeated claims of knowledge: of ordinary life, social rank, religion, labor, pleasure, and death. He sounds clever and worldly, as though he can judge everything around him—masters and servants, monks and fools, wine and horses, Rome and death itself. Yet the refrain turns the poem inward, however far outward it ranges. How can a man know so much about the world and still fail to understand himself? Probably because human beings are often acute observers of others and mysteries to themselves, an insight that did not begin with Freud. There is a widely circulated line, often misattributed to Freud: “Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure you are not, in fact, surrounded by assholes.” Villon’s bad luck, and his triumph, was that he was not merely surrounded by them. He was one himself, and for the ages.

Three special treats of this ‘Little Golden Age’ were Cordwainer Smith, J.G. Ballard, and Arthur C. Clarke. Well, Smith died and Ballard lost a bit of his fine hand after a bit, but these were still the great treats. There was a sort of magic winking and blinking in half-a-dozen places. It would be hard to extinguish all those new and elegant sources, though it would be attempted. — “The Case of the Moth-Eaten Magician” J.G. BALLARD A beach without an ocean yet, A cartless horse, a plotless prating. A dogless tail, guitarless fret, Oh why, oh why's he fascinating? This may be my favorite of Lafferty’s testy verse squibs about other science fiction writers. Against expectation, Lafferty respected Ballard. The more I think about it, the more that respect makes sense. Lafferty’s quarrel with most science fiction was that it was thin stuff: mechanically optimistic, materialist, prose-deaf, dead to spiritual pain, prone to cheap heroics, and often eager for political self-congratulation or political pandering. If these are the tests, Ballard fails almost none of them. Lafferty’s usual contempt for science-fiction people therefore has little purchase on Ballard. More positively, Ballard and Lafferty share an apocalyptic temperament. Both write as though the modern world is already a ruin, or about to dissolve. Ballard has his drowned and crystallized landscapes; Lafferty’s worlds come apart at the seams because they were provisional experiments pointing toward Prime. Both reject the arrow of reductive progress. Both are scorpion-like moralists. Both think real catastrophe ought to be real revelation. To a Catholic eschatological imagination, Ballard’s instinct that disaster is what the psyche secretly wants is recognizable, even where the theology divagates. They are also both writers of transformation rather than adventure. They care less about problem-solving heroes than about what the world means and what it is becoming. Both have powerful prose styles, and both are willing to be outré, to follow an inner logic beyond standard-issue plausibility. Lafferty could respect craft seriousness even where he did not share belief. Someone ought to work this vein, because Ballard is one of Lafferty’s most interesting interlocutors. Lafferty’s oh why is not cuteness but a profound question that says something about his own inner space.

“You are a dozen or more from among the six thousand characters I have written to represent the six-billion persons who will have lived in the world after my death. You are sketches that I did not quite fill out, you are people in my still quite sketchy world of the future. And yet I did all of you as well as I was able to.” Summer teaching—one class on economics and culture, another on Dante—together with the usual department grind, has eaten into the spare time I can carve out for Lafferty. Still, I want to jot down some thoughts about Chapter 6. We have arrived at the center of the novel, and Atrox dies his second death, if we can call it that. After leaving Gaire Castle in Ireland, the Group of Twelve, along with the spares, find themselves standing near a beach at Oosterend. Jane Chantal died in a previous chapter, but the scene immediately gives us a surprise. In the middle of the night, a slightly translucent nine-year-old girl appears in the distance, near the shoreline, under moonlight and the cries of gulls. She approaches the Twelve, then she plays a guessing game until Hilary Ardri recognizes her as a younger, still-developing version of his wife, Jane Chantal, whom he believes Atrox murdered. Jane Chantal, now calling herself Jane Galatea, another of Lafferty's parthens*, confirms what we already know: Atrox has written her back into existence, though with slight modifications, including a larger mouth where the feather quill broke through her face. Jane Galatea explains her mouth: “It should be twice as big as it should be,” Whats-my-name Jane insisted. “[Atrox] says that he always writes the mouth second-of-all, but he wrote my mouth wrong before, too little. He says that he made it only a little bit bigger than an ordinary lady’s mouth before, whereas it should have been twice as big to express me properly. That’s why he killed me probably, that and because I mocked him with my projections of him.” After this, Laughter-Lynn Casement invites the Group to her big home for a Dutch breakfast, where they meet the ghost of her second drowned husband, Sea Captain Cornelius. Captain Cornelius tells them about one of the marvels of the house at Oosterend: a miraculous Circular Stairway, built by Saint Joseph in exchange for a simple meal. Led by Laughter-Lynn, the Group descends this weird and winding staircase into the lower levels of the house, which extend beneath the ocean’s surface, reprising Lafferty’s Oceanic and all that comes with it. There the Twelve encounter the dead and the strange creatures of the sea: drowned humans, ocean-goblins, and sea-nymphs. These underwater beings complain about the roughness and obscurity of their environment, and they ask for a waterproof copy of a philosophical book by Atrox to help them understand reality. They, too, wonder whether they are unreal: “Of the ten thousand species of sea monsters that are usually reported, most of them are dreamed. Likely there are no more than five hundred valid species of us, and the rest are dreamed by us five hundred. What we would like to get from you people is a good non-water-soluble copy of the Hundred-and-One Tests of Atrox to Determine Whether One is Dreaming or Not.” The Group then reascends the stairway to a level just below the ocean’s surface, where they meet three captains from Strange Cargoes Worldwide Shippers. Their ships bear the names of Columbus’s vessels. The captains and Gorgonius Pantera discuss how Prince Leonardo the Great, who sometimes shifts between human form and golden panther, used his intuition to find Caesar Oceano and give him a multibillion-dollar ocean-shipping empire. There is also an oceanic lottery that enriches people from time to time. The ships bring Laughter-Lynn an anonymous gift of seven steam calliopes, which provide the chapter’s musical number. Saint Joseph arrives and agrees to modify the calliopes so they can play automatically, while Gorgonius writes the intricate orchestration, “Wednesday at Oosterend.” Finally, the Group climbs to the glass-enclosed Sky Studio at the very top of the staircase. There they discover Atrox Fabulinus, who is writing on a massive parchment roll with one of his nine-foot quills. Atrox explains that he is living in the year 453 as one of the seven Scribbling Giants. When one of the Twelve asks why the Giants do not create subwriters to ease the burden of writing the world’s scenarios, Atrox answers that he has already done something like this: he created historical authors such as Balzac and Charles Fort to help him document later centuries. Then Atrox falls asleep. The rest of the Group spends the evening painting and socializing while the calliopes play downstairs. At midnight, a colossal scream and a gurgling sound are heard from the Sky Studio: And right at midnight there came a horrible screaming from the Sky Studio above their heads. It recalled a little bit the wonderful screaming of Jane Chantal when she was being done to death by the nine-foot-long spear. But it was that screaming giantized. Somebody was dying in a much more violent way than would have been possible for Jane Chantal. And then the screaming broke up in a resounding gurgle that shook the house. The sound leads the Twelve to think that Atrox has murdered someone else with a Giant quill. This time, however, the murder victim will turn out to be Atrox himself. If one image in the chapter dominates all the others, it is the stairway. For the first time in the novel, Lafferty makes the book’s preoccupation with verticality physical. He is clearly working with a version of the axis mundi, a familiar concept in comparative mythology and religion: the center of the world, or the cosmic axis joining earth, heaven, and the underworld. It is a bridge between realms, a vertical point of intersection where persons, spirits, and powers may travel and communicate. We find versions of it elsewhere in Lafferty, especially in great stories such as “Continued on Next Rock.” At Oosterend, Lafferty gives us the dead at the bottom of the stairwell, in the drowned people beneath the sea; but he also fills the descent with the furniture of the unconscious. As one moves upward, one arrives at the studio, the site of authorship and the novel’s dominant image of a chief secondary cause. What seems clear to me is that any depiction of an axis mundi is also an account of how a belief system organizes its spatial and spiritual understanding of the universe. Lafferty’s stairway is oddly anthropomorphic, as if he were giving the reader a cosmological image of the author’s nervous system. Where does the image come from? From one of the better-known Catholic marvels in the United States: the staircase at Loretto. In recent decades, historical sleuthing has supplied plausible natural explanations for the Loretto Chapel staircase and has tried to deflate the miracle legend. I am going to set that aside and give the legend as legend, since it is the version Lafferty draws on. The wooden staircase at Loretto Chapel in Santa Fe, New Mexico, is a beautifully crafted and unusual spiral stair built in the late nineteenth century. As the chapel neared completion in 1878, the Sisters of Loretto realized that there was no room for an ordinary staircase to the choir loft without sacrificing much of the seating below. Unsure what to do, they prayed a nine-day novena to St. Joseph, patron saint of carpenters. Here one should note that East of Laughter is itself a novena, taking place over nine days. On the final day of the prayers, an unidentified man arrived. He carried only simple tools and offered to build the staircase. The novel plays with this tradition in its own St. Joseph with two glass planes and three nails. According to the legend, the mysterious carpenter worked for several months and built a freestanding spiral staircase that makes two complete 360-degree turns, without a central supporting column and without metal nails. He used wooden pegs instead. Once the work was finished, he vanished without collecting payment or revealing his name. The Sisters, and later generations of believers, concluded that the craftsman was St. Joseph himself, answering their prayers. Lafferty flags the connection through Captain Cornelius: “It was Saint Joseph who did it,” said Sea Captain Cornelius. “I knew him by the pipe that he had in his mouth . . . I noticed the name on his small package, Joseph Jacobson, so then I knew for sure that he was Saint Joseph . . . And in my sleep I heard a hammer with a melodious ring to it, very pleasant . . . Then when my nap was finished (it’s always finished within half an hour) I found the Galilean carpenter Joseph Jacobson. ‘The step is fixed,’ he said. ‘Really I did a little bit more than fix the step. I built a new stairway.’” By drawing on the Loretto legend, though he largely effaces its traces so that non-Catholic readers are unlikely to know what is happening, Lafferty Christianizes the novel’s axis mundi. Perhaps the other most important element in the chapter is that Atrox dies at the novel's dead center. His scream fills the lacuna from the first half of the book into the second, raising the question of whether the novel has entered a narratological region where the world scenario has not yet been written. If so, then the movement beyond Atrox is also a movement into a new kind of freedom for the characters. It is also telling that Lafferty gives us, just before this passage, a wonderful set piece about three of his major influences: Rabelais, Balzac, and Fort. In moving beyond Atrox, the reader also moves beyond those writers into something wholly Lafferty’s. Each of these writers contributed something powerful to Lafferty’s imaginative universe. Atrox Fabulinus’s claims about them operate on a meta-authorial level. Atrox says that François Rabelais, Honoré de Balzac, and Charles Fort are his fictional constructs, created to enrich the world’s timeline. He assigned Rabelais to sixteenth-century France, but the Rabelais character wrote backward in time about Atrox’s own family of Giants instead of documenting his appointed era. This is Rabelias’s great genealogy of giant-kind. It is sometimes overlooked that Rabelais’s Giants are an Old Testament parody, and that the early chapters of Pantagruel seem to take place in something like the Old Testamental age. It is as though the axis mundi in the Chapter 6 is being given a literary genealogy. After the non-novelistic world of Rabelais comes the novelistic world of realism, embodied in Balzac's documentation of nineteenth-century Paris. Then, just as Lafferty thought the novel had ended because the world had become unstructured, Atrox generates the unstructured Charles Fort in twentieth-century America to conceptualize the future heavens. Atrox says: “Instead of writing about his own day, he turned backwards to me and wrote about myself and my father and our family of giants. Mostly he got us pretty accurate, but that was no help in illuminating the future. Then I made Balzac and set him to writing in Paris of France in the nineteenth century. He was by far the best of my writing characters . . . And in the twentieth century I projected Charles Fort in America (I projected America from Amorica in France) to do my skies of the future. I had more trouble doing the skies of the future than any other thing. But I believe that Fort has done a good job on them for me.” This has a parallel in Lafferty’s own career. In the 1970s especially, Fort became one of the writers through whom Lafferty imagined a way past the constraints of both realism and conventionalized science fiction. I’ve written about this trajectory several times. Stories such as “Nor Limestone Islands” show Lafferty drawing directly on Fort’s catalog of anomalous, “damned” facts. In other words, the genealogy Atrox gives for the world-scenario is also the literary genealogy Lafferty gives himself as artist: Rabelais, Balzac, and Fort become the stages by which he accounts for his own attempt to think beyond the novel and make worlds. * Jane Chantal has become an erotically charged parthenic figure, and Lafferty shows this by calling her Galatea. The relevant Galatea comes from the Pygmalion myth in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, now best known to many readers through Shaw’s Pygmalion and its musical heir, My Fair Lady. The name Galatea is modern. It enters the tradition through Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Pygmalion, where the statue becomes “Galathée,” the milk-white woman brought into life by desire, art, and divine concession. Lafferty is playing several ideas at once: Jane Chantal as the artist who becomes the art object; Atrox as demiurge; and Hilary’s desire to have Jane restored. But the wish is granted in a fashion that fits into Lafferty’s complicated erotics. Jane returns as a nine-year-old girl, who will, admittedly, grow older over the coming chapters.

I answer that, It must be said that every evil in some way has a cause. For evil is the absence of the good, which is natural and due to a thing. But that anything fail from its natural and due disposition can come only from some cause drawing it out of its proper disposition. For a heavy thing is not moved upwards except by some impelling force; nor does an agent fail in its action except from some impediment. But only good can be a cause; because nothing can be a cause except inasmuch as it is a being, and every being, as such, is good. —Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Prima Pars, Question 49, Article 1 Sometimes, in his wild way of talking, he would say, that Gravity was an errant scoundrel, and he would add,—of the most dangerous kind too,—because a sly one; and that he verily believed, more honest, well-meaning people were bubbled out of their goods and money by it in one twelve-month, than by pocket-picking and shop-lifting in seven. In the naked temper which a merry heart discovered, he would say there was no danger,—but to itself:—whereas the very essence of gravity was design, and consequently deceit;—’twas a taught trick to gain credit of the world for more sense and knowledge than a man was worth; and that, with all its pretensions,—it was no better, but often worse, than what a French wit had long ago defined it,—viz. “A mysterious carriage of the body to cover the defects of the mind;”—which definition of gravity, Yorick, with great imprudence, would say, deserved to be wrote in letters of gold. — Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, Vol. I, Chapter XI. Chapter Five brings an interlude in which the reader sees Atrox at work and finds Lafferty speculating about the nature of reality. The situation facing the Group of Twelve becomes unambiguously theological. After Jane Chantal Ardri has been killed by a nine-foot feather, one of Lafferty’s grisliest deaths, and after the Villa Parisi at Sora has been destroyed by a landslide, the survivors narrowly escape. Laughter-Lynn Casement briefly steps into the center of the narrative, and the Group uses an ancient, eighth-century world-terminal to transport itself to Dublin. Their destination is Gaire Castle, the ancestral home of Laughter-Lynn’s mother, Countess Maude Grogley. The castle is hidden behind a perimeter of ordinary shops and a local pub, and is cut off from the outside world by a narrow, continuously flowing moat that defies gravity. The joke is that gravity is both a natural law binding on bodies that have lost praeternatural grace as well as humorlessness: . . . like true castle moats everywhere it flows round and round the castle, always running swiftly down hill. But always it returns to its starting place. Like everything else in the Castle it is now much encroached upon by things of the world and the town, and it is so narrow now that a good leaper could leap across it. Inside Gaire Castle, the characters become acquainted with Countess Maude, who welcomes the Group and introduces them to the magical character of her home. The castle is populated by giggling bats, who will later be set against more sinister bats; by other strange beings; and by Atrox: In this Castle, both the mice and the bats giggle a lot. The bats fly down the corridors in units of a legion, six thousand of them in each flight, supposedly. But sometimes in this castle we are undermanned and underbatted. Well, the little beasts are funny, and they make me giggle too. The Group then speaks with the Morning Angel, an Ogre-Siog, and Saint Brandon. Brandon gives them his cosmological testimony: the true and real earth is a lens-shaped mass floating above a largely unreal spherical planet. He once traveled to its outer limit, extended a plank beyond the edge, and looked down: Then I crawled out to the end of the plank and lay on my belly and gazed down into the void that is beyond the world. I could see the faint outline of the spherical world below me; but it was no more than wispy clouds and gouts ofmist. While the Group listens to these philosophical discussions about reality and existence, Gorgonius Pantera programs the castle’s perpetual-player harps to perform a newly composed melody. Here, the reader sees that each action-progressive chapter will have its own musical theme. Meanwhile, Hilary Ardri is broken by the death of his wife, Jane Chantal, and confronts the Giant Atrox Fabulinus, whom he blames for her murder. Later, we will learn that the murderer is in fact Prince Leopold, though it is worth noting that the end of the last chapter makes it seem as if Prince Leopold could not be the killer. Atrox, now wielding a nine-foot quill pen like the one found by the Parisis in the previous chapter, attempts to make amends by using his giant parchment to write Jane back into existence. She keeps coming into being and then flickering out again, appearing as a transparent, balloon-like iteration: Several times, transparent figures in the shape of Jane Chantal had appeared near where Atrox was working. But then the bumbling giant would mutter “Not right, just not right” and he would jab his big pen angrily into the parchment, and each transparent Jane Chantal would collapse in turn like a punctured balloon. As midnight approaches, the Group continues to debate. They discuss cosmic contagions and forged artifacts, then try to decide where they should go next With his big quill pen, Atrox Fabulinus the Roman Rabelais wrote one word "Oosterend" on his parchment. And immediately all the loose membership of theGroup of Twelve was on its way to Oosterend. “Oosterend” means “East End,” a name that keeps faith with the book’s governing condition of estrangement as being east of laughter This is a fun chapter that touches some of the book’s heaviest themes. I want to consider three parables about the nature of reality and how I make sense of them: St. Brandon’s lens-shaped world, the discourse on gravity, and the Ogre-Siog’s inside-outside doctrine. Each is really a discussion of unreality. The chapter treats the question as good-natured talk, but it moves toward an answer that will be familiar to readers of Lafferty, especially those who know Past Master. Unreality is a privation, a thinning of being: the atoms of the earlier chapter gone mostly empty, as if Ouden were snacking on them. It is not a rival substance. In my reading, St. Brandon’s lens thesis is participation metaphysics spatialized as geography. Beneath the lens, we are told, is another spherical earth, difficult to perceive but real enough to cast a shadow on the moon. It is “less than cloud-thin,” real only “for that part of it that corresponds to the lens-shaped world.” This is straight out of Lafferty’s toolkit: the old Platonic-Augustinian doctrine of degrees of being, literalized as a fable about a human space that only partly conforms to the measurable, scientific world-picture: The spherical world (I learned it for certain then) is completely unreal, exceptfor that part of it that corresponds to the lens-shaped world. Oh, it will cast a spherical shadow on the moon and little tricks like that to give the impression that it is real. But its artifice is easy to see through, literally. It is not real. St. Brendan says that the real is Holy Ireland. I take the fable of the lens-shaped world to turn on a pun, just as the gravity discourse will. The lens is what allows one to see the local ambient, but St. Brendan wants to get beyond the lens. What he sees beneath it is the vapor that Qoheleth says the world is made of in Ecclesiastes. The moral lesson, if there is one, seems to be that a local circle of reality is where grace is met. Grace is experienced as a local event, and it can be withdrawn, so that lands “drop out of reality after being real for a few centuries.” Something like this must be the case with Flatland, which is not a lens, with its zero curvature. When a local reality is lost in a world-ending, people are left with fading collective memory: But many parts of the spherical world have been intersected by the lens world as the compilation drifts and changes through the centuries. The unreal regions and the presently unreal people in them sometimes have legends and memories of the time when we were real. This recalls Alexander the Great from the last chapter. But notice that Brandon speaks in two ways. On one hand, he speaks in terms of gradation: “the less real earth.” On the other, he speaks in terms of a binary: “completely unreal, except . . .” Past the lens lies privatio boni. St. Brandon’s ambient tapers from a hundred miles to a hundred feet, and then to the edge where the plank hangs over the void of hevel, the vanities of vanities, meaningless meaningless. There, contingent being can thin toward nothing. The metaphysics of a world built this way is held together by something like Aquinas’s doctrine of conservation as continuous creation, which is what Atrox is doing in the next room as an instrumental/secondary cause, though his time is coming to an end. The Ogre-Siog then enters the chapter’s dialogue as something of a corrective voice. We are moving vertically in the chapter. His doctrine is that the inside of the world is real, while the outside is less than real. Reality is relocated inward: There are two sides to the world, the inside and the outside . . . The inside isreal and the outside is less than real. Mostly we Sioga live on the inside orreal side of the world. We only come onto the outside of the world to steal apples or, in my case, to visit with the Countess Maude Grogley whom I love. With his demurral from Brandon—“there is a slight difference in them, but not as much as he makes out”—the Ogre-Siog pulls Brandon’s discourse back toward genuine privation, as if the lenticular surface were goodness thinned rather than a second substance. Atrox, in the next room, is doing something that looks demiurgic; Lafferty therefore installs an anti-Gnostic guardrail. The inside is the locus of being. This is something like the perspectival jolt in Dante’s Paradiso, Canto XXVIII. From below, we look up at the night sky and see stars and planets moving in vast concentric shells around us. From the vantage point of the Empyrean, however, the relation is reversed: what seems furthest is nearest, and the immense universe Dante has traversed becomes small, while the spiritual realm expands boundlessly around the bright point of light at its center. Or it is like moving through the mansions in The Interior Castle. The Ogre-Siog’s discourse also picks up what the novel has already shown in its mythology of Little People underground. The Ogre reminds us that the sídhe live beneath the earth and come up to steal. From the vantage point of the lens, the Sioga seem to cross from the less-real into the real, but that, of course, gets the matter backward, like taking the lens out of one’s glasses to see better. The medieval reason for the Ogre’s crossing brings together appetite and cosmology, the world in which love moves the stars. The Ogre says that what drives him is appetite and love, motors in the Augustinian and Thomistic traditions. The fruit-theft is a clear wink at Confessions II, where Augustine steals pears not from need but from disordered desire. In this second fable, the traffic between inside and outside runs two ways: cupiditas or caritas. Then comes the third fable, this one from the Morning Angel. Whereas the first two fables use the imagery of space to make their points, the third turns turns to the metaphysics of time. The vocabulary is scholastic. Gravity and death, the Angel says, are not natures but “accidents or illnesses . . . subject to easy cures.” What is is accidental to nature can be removed without destroying nature. Then we get the epidemiology of gravity, drawn from Romans 5:12. The contagion entered through “a very narrow corner of the universe”; then “it spread, it spread”; and now it has “peaked,” is “declining,” and will “disappear”: Once it was of a very limited extent, a slight sickness, like a cold in the cosmic head, that afflicted only a very narrow corner of the universe. But then it spread, it spread, it was one of those quick contagions. It was like the three-day flu. And it was everywhere . . . But I believe that it has peaked and that it is now perhaps declining. I feel that it will decline rapidly and then disappear. So then, in all likelihood, it will prove to be much less than a three-day influenza. A resurrection joke in a chapter about resurrecting Jane Chantal, this recapitulates Augustine’s pear theft while also recalling Eden, which is fitting for Gaire Castle and its connection to Eden. The matter is gravity and grace: heaviness as the law of fallen nature. More specifically, I think Lafferty is making something like the Thomistic endowment of the glorified body, agilitas, which Thomas describes as freedom from weight, and of which Dante receives a measure when he takes flight into the heavens. Lafferty writes, “Death is but a minor episode in life,” his definalization theme, but here, too, privation is restated because God did not make death. It will be the last enemy destroyed. What the Morning Angel describes is the hope of a world that will come fully into being only after the General Resurrection; but gravity may already be lessened wherever something like a Riant Giant, or a Laughing Christ, is recognized. What Lafferty does next is typical of his fiction, but it can frustrate a reader. Having led us into a wild debate over reality and unreality, he then points out that this debate is relatively unimportant in the grand scheme of his universe: Reality-Unreality is only one of the eleven aspects of things, and we should notgive more than one-eleventh importance to it. Yet the entire novel is all about it. Relatively unimportant? What does this mean? Toward the end of the novel, a minor character gives us a list of some of the other eleven, and that list will place the reality-unreality distinction in sharper perspective by showing the coordinates of unreality. Jane Chantal seems to me the central fact of the chapter. Understanding how she relates to the three fables is obviously important, though I have not worked it out in a way that fully satisfies me. At present, I can say only that she functions as a test case: either she is real, or an unreal thing that can become real. Atrox’s attempt to vivify her, followed by his frustrated stabbing of the page with his quill, seems to enact the question. And it is probably good news that she comes back. Finally, we have the mystery of how to bring any reality into being. Since “only good can be a cause,” we know that reality may be lost or restored, but how can it be manufactured out of its own absence? This may be why Atrox’s pen becomes so frustrated. The murder and the un-murders, the draft-by-draft Jane-figures, all belong to the good doing the causing, while unreality keeps running up against an absence. The demotion of the reality question to “one-eleventh importance” follows from the same principle. A privation cannot be the main thing about anything. What is real is the being a thing possesses, not the being it lacks. "If she was real before, then she will be real again. If she was not real before, then she will not be real afterwards."

Yes, The Devil Is Dead was probably the most “haunting” of my thirty-or-so published books. I’ve had this “haunting” in a dozen or so of my short stories, but this is my only novel in which this is the case. The haunting has always been a long series of recurring dreams, and the only way to resolve them was to get them on paper. This has solved about ninety percent of the “haunting” but never all of it. I originally intended The Devil Is Dead to be one of three “Simutaneous Novels.” — Letter Of Lafferty’s novel titles, my favorite is The Devil Is Dead. It is hard for me to see the title and not hear The Young Wolfe Tones belting out “Some Say the Devil Is Dead”: Katie, she is tall and thin, tall and thin, tall and thin Katie, she is tall and thin. She likes a drop of brandy Drinks it in the bed at night, drinks it in the bed at night, drinks it in the bed at night It makes her nice and randy Most sources say the song is Irish, but a Scottish variant has Kirkcaldy in place of Killarney: Shades of Dana Coscuin. It is a venerable phrase, “the devil is dead,” with deep roots in English. What brought it to mind today was an old review of Chesterton’s The Defendant. C. F. G. Masterman attacked Chesterton for being insufficiently attentive to suffering and to the darker, dourer aspects of life, a charge sometimes brought against Lafferty. In Lafferty’s case, the objection is not usually put so cogently. Readers notice the blood, murder, and extravagant death, then ask, “Why is there so much this stuff here?” Then one will get something about about martyrs that makes little sense but not the obvious question. The problem isn’t blood or death. What the reader wants to understand is why there is so much cruelty in Lafferty, and why is cruelty treated so lightly. It is hard to frame the right question. Cruelty makes black comedy possible, but cruelty can seem an offense against Christian charity. Here, we find a real difference between Chesterton and Lafferty because, no doubt about it, Lafferty’s art is often cruel. For instance he is callous to the mentally disabled. Chesterton never is. Yet Lafferty’s cruelty is not cheap shot cruelty. It restores proportion to horror, either by disarming it with good humor or by exorcising it as something so contemptibly ugly that it ought to be laughed away. But it will not look like good humor should one not share Lafferty’s ultimate horizon. At times, it will seem pinched and mean spirited. Masterman was troubled by something different but analogous in Chesterton, again, not cruelty, but the comic unseriousness of evil. In “The Blasphemy of Optimism,” published in The Speaker in 1902, he dropped his tactical nuke, writing, “Mr. Chesterton is convinced that the Devil is dead.” In other words, Mr. Chesterton is minor because Mr. Chesterton does not recognize the evidential problem of evil. Mr. Chesterton is morally and intellectually unserious and therefore metaphysically meretricious. The same worry can be raised about RAL. The earliest use of the phrase “the devil is dead” that I have found comes from the East Anglian morality play Mankind, usually dated to 1465–1470. Mankind dramatizes the agon for an ordinary human soul. Its hero, Mankind, is tempted by comic Vice figures such as Mischief, New Guise, Nowadays, Nought, and Titivillus, while Mercy tries to guide him toward repentance. The play is both pious and bawdy, and very funny, and it often draws the audience into its stagey action through invitations to interact with its Vice characters. At one point, Titivillus, the devil’s agent, hushes the crowd. One can imagine him shushing with his scandalous hands as he implores the rowdy audience, Qwyst! pesse! þe Deull ys dede! I xall goo ronde in hys ere. The phrase later shows up in John Skelton’s Colyn Cloute. Skelton was an early Tudor English poet and satirist, creator of the irregular Skeltonic verse and of memorable attacks on church corruption. For Skeltonic flavor, one could do far worse than this YouTube video, a poem that has the finest invective about an ugly woman in English literature, a satirical masterpiece about tavern sin. Colyn Cloute also savages the corrupt clergy and abuses of Catholic pastorality. Near its beginning, Skelton says that writing, preaching, or criticizing vice is all but useless nowadays in England because people will the knock teacher of virtue as a fool or an incoherent prig no matter what he says, even when he is right. When such a teacher hits the nail on the head It standeth in no stead; The devil, they say, is dead The Devil is dead. In this instance, the devil is dead leads to antinomianism. Do what thou wilt. By this time in the English language, “the devil is dead” is all but a proverb, so it is not surprising to find it in John Heywood’s mid-Tudor treasure chest of proverb books. Heywood was a minor poet and musician, now best remembered for his witty interludes, such as The Four PP and Johan Johan. In some of his examples, we discover a bridge between the medieval morality drama of Mankind and later English comedy by focusing on debate, satire, and everyday speech. He records the expression and offers variations on a theme: “The devil is dead” then became a line in a popular nursery rhyme that has some relevance to Lafferty’s The Devil Is Dead, if we think of the grave of Iffrean of the Coscuin Chronicles, father of Papadiabolous I and II of Argo, and Iffrean’s headstone that reads I.N.C.G.P. Bogovitch, weedy and overgrown in Galveston, Texas: The novel describes the discovery of his grave: Finnegan led them, after some wandering around, to an old and neglected grave. They had to pull weeds to see the carving on the gravestone. And it meant nothing when they had cleared it, nothing to Finnegan, at least. The carving on the stone was I.N.C.G.P. Bogovitch. This was the grave of the Devil himself. And that was the puzzling name carved on his gravestone. Most of these English currents eddying around the expression flow into Lafferty's great poem "Diabolique," maybe the best poem he ever wrote, so let’s end there:

History is not false but true when it is put dramatically. It is not true but false when it arrives anyhow, proceeds at random like an unconsidered run of nature, and ceases unravelled without the gathering of the threads into a conclusion. — Hilaire Belloc, "The Historian" In 1955, Hollis and Carter published a volume of Hilaire Belloc’s uncollected essays under the title One Thing and Another. Lafferty was an avid reader of Belloc, so it is unlikely that he did not know the book. It contains many delightful pieces, all charmingly (or gratingly) dated by Belloc’s premodernist sensibility, but one essay is especially important for thinking about Lafferty: “The Historian,” perhaps Belloc’s clearest statement of his philosophy of writing history. That philosophy should be distinguished from Belloc’s particular historical judgments: his polemic against Protestant historiography, his expositions about European politics, and above all his unrelenting view that Jews are a people marked by ineradicable dual loyalty. The question of Protestantism enters the essay indirectly when Belloc distinguishes between writing for those who largely share one’s worldview and writing for those who do not. At the end of this post, I include a copy of the essay, which is, I think, an invaluable primer if one believes, as I do, that Lafferty held Belloc’s view of history but also believed that the world had become unstructured either during or after Belloc’s lifetime. Today, I want to go through some of this because it is relevant to East of Laughter. Belloc closes “The Historian” with a maxim that could hardly be more Laffertian: “history is to society what memory is to a man, and only by true record do nations know themselves.” East of Laughter, for all its fantasia, is grounded in this view. Its world is sustained by those twenty-one Pillars, seven of them the Scribbling Giants who write “the scenarios and histories of the world.” When the the Giants are killed or die, the world loses not only its record but its coherence. In Lafferty’s terms, this is a world-ending; and after a world ends, there follows, presumably, a period of unstructuring of the sort one finds in The Fall of Rome or at the end of Past Master. East of Laughter says as much when Lafferty writes: "It has been said further that the two most illustrious vocations are to be a giant, and to be an historian. How could anybody not be attracted to the possibility of being both of them at once?" History can sustain a human-made world in being. Laffery picked that verb carefully, knowing in Latin it means “to hold up.” It is slightly ambiguous. Productively so. As I have often argued on the blog, “world” in this sense does not mean Prime, the substratum of reality. Metafictionally it means a human order: a structure of memory, inheritance, institutions, habits, and shared meaning. This makes Belloc a useful companion when reading East of Laughter. In short, Lafferty gives fantasy form to the crisis Belloc describes in historical writing, the moment when historical memory goes off the rails. For Belloc, this produces what he calls “the Dull”: history without the real whys. For Lafferty, the same failure appears under his master trope of Flatland, or, as he puts it: "For the world is aimless and arrant when it has no narrative flow or way or direction or impetus to move it. The world is goofy when it has no such direction." East of Laughter Belloc calls it the essential teleology of all truly historical writing. History can sustain a human-made world in its conservation. The substratum of reality,in the way the pillars an analytic institution just are. As long as there are men, there will be some structure of memory, inheritance, institutions, habits, and shared meaning. This, again, is what makes Belloc such a helpful companion to East of Laughter. He circumscribes the possibilies of both historical amnesia (for him Whig history) and history as forgery or lie (for him Whig history). Lafferty gives fantasy form to the epistemic crisis Belloc describes as failures in historical writing: the moment when historical memory goes off the rails. His essay diagnoses typical ways historical derangement happens. For Belloc, the derailment produces Dull History, unsharpened historical form without the real whys. Lafferty put is this way in “The Day After the World Ended”: At the worst, we've lost our last world. At the best, we're between worlds. We're living in Flatland, and we're not even curious about the paradoxes to be found here. Life here in ‘Flatland’ is like life in a photographic negative. Or it is life in the cellar of a world that has blown away. He spells this out further in his essay on Tolkien as a Christian when he says the only valid environment is the Incarnation: In the light of the Redemption as the central act of history which illuminates everything both before and after itself in time and which makes itself the only valid environment, is it possible to leave Christ out of any work on any subject? "Tolkien as Christian" In the wake of world loss, people still have to make informed choices and speak to one another about higher things. Those who are well ordered will know that something is missing from any utopia that does not acknowledge the only valid environment. For Lafferty, that means an environment ordered around the Incarnation and Resurrection as the axis of history. Something has to signal the stakes of world loss. A flat world is flat because it has lost verticality. The furniture of the old order may be gone, but for Lafferty, the capacity and the obligation to make new worlds never go away. What is the normative force behind that obligation? Is it just the state of being unhomed? You got to, so get moving? Lafferty made it possible to selectively read it that way because he was so shaken by the unstructuring of the Christian West, yet read closely, and one sees he thought that if one worked earnestly the valid environment would reassert itself in the barrens. In East of Laughter, Lafferty uses the salvific image of the laughing Christ to make this point. A flat world is one that cannot laugh the deepest laughter that knows the world is comic because it has a happy ending. And if anything keeps breaking through the oneiric rubble of East of Laughter, it is laughter: field hands who “laugh and giggle as if they’d rupture themselves,” the Second Psalm’s “He who is throned in Heaven laughs,” and the book’s most important secondary figure, the Laughing Giant, the Riant Giant: The sponsors loom from far and fey, And brassy trumpets blow, A Giant’s born to us today. O let the people know!" which is, in turn, a world birth. Solomon Izzersted tries to usurp the role of head midwife, but Dennis Lollardy, the man who forges the laughing Christ, achieves the office of head giant. He resets or makes visible the substratum of reality. This is where Belloc and Lafferty only seem to part ways. Belloc wrote within a structured world, one he quarreled with; Lafferty, according to his lights, wrote in an unstructured one, one he quarreled with. In “The Historian,” Belloc assumes settled communities: readers who share “the arms and manners of that world,” as he puts it. The historian’s method, he says, depends on whether he is writing for his own kind or “for those who are not of us.” This is not a fashionable view of alterity, yet that shared world is an enabling condition, or communion, for historical writing. It presupposes a common, intact past, just what Flatland has lost and what dream cannot firm up. Once the shared world has gone dim, once the noetic darkening repeatedly mentioned in East of Laughter has set in, there is no stable “us” left for the historian to address. As Leo Parisi asks the ghost of Charles Fort, "Charles, either in the context of the Special Fortean Universe, or in the larger General Universe, do you know what has gone wrong that the stars and moon and sun have all been dimming for several days, that all the vital functions of the world and the universe have slowed down or weakened?” Still, Belloc half-saw Lafferty’s kind of exit, though held that the strongest kind of history can convert its audience, bringing “a new state of mind” into being. Such writing does not just shore up an old horizon but makes one. That, in its unstructured-world way, is what East of Laughter is about. Look around and the world is empty. It is like blowing up a photo and seeing between the pixels. It is also like the old joke about the two grandmothers who meet on the street, one pushing her new grandchild in a pram. “Your granddaughter is so beautiful,” says the first. “Just wait till I show you her picture,” says the other. For Belloc, the goal is historical retrieval. He wanted to save old Europe and what he called Tradition, which was the continuity of the Catholic historical imagination. Although Lafferty mostly sets East of Laughter in a phantasmagorical old Europe, the act of world-writing, or scribbling, is not retrieval. Belloc was, in many ways, a post-Reformation thinker who knew that one could not simply return to his idealized Middle Ages. Nonetheless, he believed that one could build a continuity from that world to his own structured moment in time. Crooked English timber and rot called for intense house inspection and renovation. That is why he wrote so many biographies, so many books about France, so many essays on Catholicism, so many works on tradition, and the works on the Reformation itself, especially on the way he believed it had been Whiggified, that is, distorted by bourgeois Protestants. When Jane Chantal, newly made a New Giantess, describes the work of making history, it is not retrieval at all. Better to conceive of it as fiat, or a response to "The world is dying, you know, from diminished input": I write that the men working in the field over there should be happy, and they laugh and giggle as if they’d rupture themselves. Then I write ‘not that damned happy’, and they are as they were to begin with. She memorably grows a mahogany tree where mahogany does not grow: "Yes, twelve feet in diameter. That’s what I wrote that it should be. I wrote that there should grow a mahogany tree twelve feet in diameter and a thousand years old on that hillock there." Declaration, not memory, has become necessary to filling out a valid environment given the unstructuring, one centered around Atrox's most prized possession, the laughing Christ. That last point is to say she does not write the substratum of reality she writes on. She did not author the cosmos, and she did not author her own return: I’ve been dead, and now I live again. That hasn’t happened to most people. And then I’m an artist in all the arts, and hardly anyone else is, except possibly you. she says, announcing the book’s resurrection motif. She measures her work against a standard she finds rather than makes, speaking of "points of contact between their trashiness and my valid work." Trashiness is Lafferty’s trashed-life principle under aesthetic judgment. Beyond the fiat, underneath holds an unwritten ground that institutes the three sets of seven pillars, which no Giant calls into being. The pillars might totter, but they, as analytic institutions, never end. Things are so bad in East of Laughter, so estranged, that the only way back to sanity is through righteous laughter. Belloc’s situation, Lafferty assumes, was not like this. For Belloc, what is needed is besieged truth under discipline: “advocacy is the negation of truth.” Lafferty’s ground laughs, and discloses the plenitude I mentioned in the last post not through austere record but through fertile making, what he called for at the end of “The Day After the World Ended.” That is why, I think, the chief world-writer is a forger, and why the book can say without irony that we “live in a Forgers’ World,” where someone handles “necessary forgeries in writing the world.” It is a pun. Whether this opposes Belloc’s philosophy of history or only extends it depends on how bad the unstructuring is, and how deep. This shows in the pun of the book’s master trope of forgery. If forge means “deceive,” then Lafferty licenses a holy fabrication that Belloc would have rejected as a lie. If forge means “make,” then the two agree at bottom and differ only in degree. A forge is a smithy, and forge descends from the Latin word for workshop. In this case, “necessary forgeries in writing the world" means "necessary writings in writing of the world." There is a great distance between a world kept structured by the true extension of a previous record and a world sustained by laughing invention, but that distance can be bridged by the middle term of forging as a creative act, should there exist a minimum substratum of reality. In “The Historian,” Belloc gives the reader an image for this. True history, he says, is “not a spear thrust, but rather a piece of carving.” In East of Laughter, Atrox is murdered with his own writing-quill, a nine-foot goose feather later found “with blood and gore on the quill end,” and at that death the reader is told that “the World staggered.” In a world made legible by historical writing, the pen is double. It brings the truth of a world into view, but it can also write new worlds under conditions of amnesia, where the past has been unwritten because it has been forgotten. This is not postmodernism because Lafferty does not think the world is finally only a master narrative, as Lyotard would have it, or an emplotment, as Hayden White would have it. The Incarnation certifies the valid environment, and at the center of that environment stands a non-narratological actuality: Christ. To close, I would say that Belloc and Lafferty share a grammar of what history was: history was a society’s memory, and it may become so again if the new Giants script it into being. A truly historical world, even one as zany as East of Laughter, needs proportion, measure, and making. No one in East of Laughter re-members the body of the old world back into being. Instead, the novel gathers lively fragments of that world, what I have called bricospolia, and drills down to the one thing that makes an environment valid.