First, let it be understood that I am a very prejudiced man. “Prejudiced” means simply working from prejudgments, from previously acquired information. A juryman in a trial case should be free from prejudice as to that case, but I cannot think of another circumstance where prejudice is a disadvantage, though unfortunately the word has a bad name. It is a distinct disadvantage to have to wake up in a new world every day and to learn it all over again. — Luna #67, interview with Paul Walker I wrote a story once, “Or Little Ducks Each Day,” about little ducks waking up every morning in a new world as it were, and so being the only unprejudiced creatures there are. — Letter of March 9, 1993 I'm even of the belief that a fair amount of racial prejudice is healthy — Letter of March 9, 1993 "Do you ever go down to Rhineland?" “Or Little Ducks Each Day” is complex. It invites a naïve reading that takes it as a straightforward condemnation of prejudice. That is certainly how I have seen it treated online. Here is a story that one can easily like. But given what Lafferty argued elsewhere about the nature of healthy prejudice , one would be right to suspect that the picture is complicated. I’ve recently written about this aspect of Lafferty’s work, noting that the obliqueness of his fiction invites comforting interpretive leaps that glide past relevant contexts. In an earlier post, for instance, I pointed out that Lafferty believed the United States government had, on the whole, treated Native Americans well—a position that, I suspect, would surprise many of his readers, given his profound empathy with Native Americans. This is one area where I believe Petersen’s interpretations need to be carefully qualified. It still isn’t very clear to me how one does the weighing. In “Or Little Ducks Each Day,” we get an overreaching WASP and a Jew who both act as agents of control and coordination , always a Lafferty bete noire . The WASP eventually wanders into a Catholic heterotopia and dies. What becomes particularly fraught is the way Lafferty plays with the prejudices within that heterotopia while treating the WASP far more harshly than the Catholics. Maybe this was connected to the distance Lafferty always felt between himself and WASPs. Of his war experience, he once wrote, “It came to me one night that I was much nearer in mind and understanding and everything to the Tagalog-speaking Catholics around me (by that time I could talk Tagalog pretty well) than to the mostly WASP Protestants that I lived with. These WASPs have always been sort of alien to me in a way that Mexicans are not, that Italians are not.” Jim Snapjudge is a Prejudicial Analyst, a man whose profession and entire worldview are built on absolute certainty. He is "a mind that preyed: not one to be preyed upon," and he moves through the world making snap judgments, which he believes are intelligent predictions about the fates of others based on their physical traits and ancestry. He feels no guilt for the tragedies that follow his forecasts. We are told about the suicide of Cletus Dogwood. Snapjudge thinks he has no blood on his hands. He "merely judged, correctly, that it would happen." For Snapjudge, prejudgment is not a flaw but a science: Prejudice as a Work of Art. His confidence receives a blow when he meets two people on the street. First, a young man named Godfrey Halskragen, then a lively young woman, Teresa Tuesdaychild, both of whom he assigns grim fates. To his surprise, they seem to challenge his pronouncements telepathically. "Could I not be different from my template?" Godfrey thinks. "May I not escape?" This triggers Snapjudge's memory of an amoebic wink he once saw under a microscope—a tiny, primordial act of rebellion that now resurfaces. Snapjudge becomes so uneasy that he is driven to the office of his competitor, the Jewish Jonah Hirnbrecher, for a consultation. Jonah confirms that Snapjudge's prophetic faculty is indeed failing. And he delivers a prediction of his own: Snapjudge will die this night. When asked how, Jonah says, "Wet." Then Jonah performs a small ritual, explaining, "I am removing your Prophet's Mantle." He unfastens an invisible garment from Snapjudge's shoulders. Now stripped of his spiritual identity, Snapjudge heads to the one place his day's predictions must still come to pass. He arrives at the Ruination Bar and Grill in a district called Rhineland, expecting to witness a murder and a young woman's ruin. There, he finds Godfrey and Teresa together just as a man known as the Buckaroo storms in. The man draws a gun and shoots Godfrey, but the violent scene switches to farce. While real murder has happened amongst the shadows on the floor, the gun is a water pistol. Godfrey is covered not in blood but in barbecue sauce. When the pistol then explodes in the Buckaroo's hand, it showers Teresa in a "mélange of writhing red sauce," and the entire bar erupts in "hilarity and happy pandemonium" at the elaborate prank. Snapjudge is mortified. He frantically tries to force the participants to enact the murder with a real gun. The terrible and ridiculous mistake must be righted. The patrons turn on him. The proprietor throws him out of the bar in a beautiful arching trajectory. Snapjudge stumbles through a broken plank on the boardwalk, falling into a small backwater. He drowns, fulfilling Jonah’s prophecy. The next morning, his body is found by the residents of the pond. They're unprejudiced little ducks. A summary can’t capture how brutal the violence in the story is when it appears, or how shocking it becomes when Lafferty instantly undoes it. He writes, The music in the other room had changed its motif. Now it was menace music and it built to a climaxing mood. Then the Buckaroo exploded in voice and action. "Caught the two of you here!" he howled, and a not-quite-right gun was in his left hand. "Die, pig, die." "Shriek!" cried Teresa. "Bang!" cried the explosion. And the gunshot hit Godfrey Halskragen in the face and head. Gore! Bright red gore, dark red gore, serum-colored gore, brain gore all over Godfrey! A moan, probably a death moan, from the bespattered man with the gushing head! Smokey smell of blood and of burnt flesh! What? Here was Fate vindicated indeed. But could so much blood come from one pistol shot? "It’s wrong, something has gone wrong!" Jim Snapjudge was complaining in a voice that had gone reedy. "The blood-smell is wrong, and it’s too clotted. There cannot be that much splattered out of one little bullet hole. And the gun should have cried 'Bang!' The man shouldn’t have cried 'Bang!' Fate will not be mocked.’” And after Snapjudge names Fate to be his God that will not be mocked (Galatians 6:7), Lafferty deflates of the gore: “Damn you, Buck!” Godfrey Halskragen howled at the big Buckaroo. “This is my best and only suit. Yeah, and it’s my best and only face.” “Bang! Bang!” Buck cried out the explosion noises again, but the big water pistol with its load of Old Hickory Barbecue Sauce and Vinegar and Ketchup had jammed. Buck applied great power and fervor to it. Then it exploded into the primariest color of them all and completely covered the face and head and hair of Teresa Tuesdaychild with a mélange of writhing red sauce. “Ruined, ruined, now I can never marry!” she whooped. Then there was hilarity and happy pandemonium throughout the Ruination Bar and Grill and Candy-House!” In thinking about the carnivalesque in Lafferty, I’ve argued that Bakhtin’s ideas are of limited use, and this episode shows why I prefer festive comedy over the carnivalesque. What happens here is that Snapjudge is exposed as a false prophet of Fate; he becomes the real butt of the joke—another fool who gets exactly what he deserves at Lafferty’s hand. Do the staged murder and barbecue gore point toward anything utopian? I don’t think so. They just brilliantly humiliate and expel Snapjudge in order to disclose a deeper moral order beneath his pseudo-science. His death, with his purple-faced corpse bobbing in the water among the little ducks, is a punitive, cyclical restoration of right order, not an opening into emancipatory carnival. What makes this so complicated in “Or, Little Ducks Each Day” is that Lafferty is hard on everyone, but his sympathies are unmistakably asymmetrical. To get at this, I’m going to focus on two related elements: first, how ethno-essentialism operates in the story, and second, how Lafferty quietly arranges matters so that the “winners” turn out to be Catholics. The clearest way I can see to do this is through the question of the Rhineland and the initial ambiguity surrounding Godfrey’s religious identity. At the start, Godfrey (God’s peace) could plausibly be either Lutheran or Catholic. But once Snapjudge subjects him to prejudicial analysis, he concludes Godfrey must be Catholic. Snapjudge thinks: “Mostly of German-Irish blood. A lapsed Lutheran or Catholic. No, no, his German ears were halsstarrig (stubborn), but not that stubborn. A man with such graceful tragi to his ears could hardly be a Lutheran.” This judgment reveals Snapjudge’s misreading of the Rhineland weltanschauung , which he believes he understands. He thinks he can classify it—see through it and around it—but he cannot. And at this point it’s worth seeing that Teresa has one of the most conspicuously Catholic names in all of Lafferty. The odds of finding a non-Catholic Teresa in his fiction are about the same as finding a Darwinian treated with kid gloves. Her last name, Tuesdaychild, moreover, is a joke on being “full of grace.” We are told that she is the product of parthenogenesis, a Marian joke about the loose morals of her mother. The two characters who undo Snapjudge will be Catholics. The Rhineland is important in the history of Catholicism. To give a single example, one of the best-known accounts of Vatican II is Ralph Wiltgen ’s The Rhine Flows into the Tiber  (1967). It argues that a well-organized bloc of Northern European bishops and theologians—the so-called “Rhine alliance”—shaped the Council’s debates and final documents. But their influence was hardly unprecedented; Catholicism had dominated the Rhineland for centuries. Even that understates it. This dominance reaches back to Roman-era Christian communities that developed into major medieval centers such as Cologne, Trier, and Mainz, each an influential archbishopric in its own right. Monasteries, cathedral chapters, and pilgrimage sites flourished across the region, embedding Catholic identity deeply into its politics and culture. St. Hildegard of Bingen was from the Rhine. St. Boniface proselytized it. Then there is Charlemagne . When the Protestant Reformation reached the Rhineland in the sixteenth century, Lutheran and Reformed movements gained footholds mainly on the region’s periphery. The influence was limited. The core Rhineland territories mostly rejected Protestantism, supported by strong ecclesiastical leadership and an effective Counter-Reformation . Catholic institutions stayed central to public life, and Protestantism, while present and historically significant, never eclipsed Catholic predominance. Then there are the Jews of the Rhineland . Cities like Mainz, Worms, and Speyer (collectively known as the ShUM cities) were major centers of Jewish scholarship, law, and religious life during the early Middle Ages. These communities helped set the foundations of Ashkenazi Jewish tradition. Out of them came famous rabbis, academies, and legal rulings that influenced Jewish practice across Europe. And I’ll add that Lafferty’s devil Karl Marx was from the Rhineland, born in Trier. Needless to say, Jews in the Rhineland also played key roles in regional trade and finance. All this is to say that Lafferty’s choice of the Rhineland is not incidental; it is central to whatever argument the story is making. The way I read it, he places Snapjudge, who stands for a sterile "unhealthy" prejudice, into a landscape that is perfectly fine with the deep-rooted, experiential “prejudgment” Lafferty championed both publicly and privately. This community of pre-judgers is the opposite of the unprejudiced little ducks waking up in a new world every day. It’s worth remembering that over the course of the story, Snapjudge gets a hell of a lot right. He correctly deduces Godfrey’s Catholicism from the shape of his ears, but he is utterly oblivious to the cultural reality of what this Catholic identity means. For him, "Catholic" is a data point in a deterministic formula. He doesn’t know that in Lafferty's fictional Rhineland, Godfrey’s ethno-essentialized identity is a ticket into a festive world that is fundamentally hostile to his grim, fatalistic prejudice. He is, in short, something like what Lafferty sees in the Protestants. Hence the Jew and the WASP: “Good afternoon, Jim,” Jonah said, and subvocally he added “Damned Wasp!” “Good afternoon, Jonah,” Snapjudge gave his greeting, and voicelessly he added “Damned Jew-bug!” This subliminal name-calling was only a little ritual knife-whetting that they used. It certainly didn't imply unfriendliness. Both the Jew and the WASP are driven by business in a way that the Catholic heterotopia isn’t. Lafferty shows the close connection of the two by having Jonah take away Snapjudge’s mantle of prophecy. This links the two, as one becomes Elijah to the other’s Elisha. It’s another example of Lafferty using counterfiguration to show that these two prejudicial prophets are in the same pod. They might look like rivals, but they are on the same spiritual team. The mantle episode alludes the great passage of the mantle in 2 Kings. In fact, it reverses its logic: "He took up also the mantle of Elijah that fell from him, and went back, and stood by the bank of Jordan;" 2 Kings 2:13 "And he took the mantle of Elijah that fell from him, and smote the waters, and said, Where is the Lord God of Elijah? and when he also had smitten the waters, they parted hither and thither: and Elisha went over." 2 Kings 2:13 The common-denominator business connection becomes overt when the man in the Rhineland district pronounces judgment on Snapjudge, seizing on the trait that links him to the typlogical Jew: “Lady, I hate him too,” said a man at the next table. “He looks right through you. He's got some kind of business where he gives ratings on people to companies that hire them.” Linking these two types, Jew and Protestant, might seem odd, but it is an old idea—a perceived structural affinity between Calvinists and Jews. Not all WASPs are Calvinists obviously, but Lafferty seems to be going after what Weber called an ideal type , with double predestination in the background of the social imaginary. Lafferty draws on this long-standing Jew-Prot ethnos parallelism to set up a foil to the Catholics of the Rhineland district. The Jew-Prot idea used to be commoner currency, with both Calvinism and Judaism often being characterized as traditions shaped by strict law, moral discipline, textual intensity, and a strong sense of communal election. The closest we have nowadays in America’s poisoned politics might be issue of Christian Zionism and evangelicals and the break-up of the Republican coalition on the issue of Israel. Typlogical ethno-essentialism makes the Jew-Protect resemble each other more than either resembles Lafferty’s typologized Catholics, whether ethno-relatived to the Irish, Mexican, French, Italian, Spanish, etc. One of the classic anti-semitic statements of this Jew-Prot typology can be found in Werner Sombart , who wrote The Jews and Modern Capitalism  (1911). Sombart was a critic of the Jewish sociologist Max Weber . Weber keeps his Protestant Work Ethic very far from Jews. In fact, it’s essential to the Weberian project. Sombart was not having it. He argued that Calvinists and Jews form a single “economic-religious type,” characterized by rationalized ethics, inward cohesion, and a deep confidence in divine favor. As he put it, Altogether, then, there appears to be sufficient evidence for the deduction of Puritan doctrines from Jewish sources. The specialists must decide. Here I have been able to do no more than give a hint or two. And in conclusion I would draw attention to a little humorous publication, which appeared in the year 1608 and the contents of which would seem to demonstrate the close connexion between Judaism and Calvinism (which is only Puritanism). It is called Der Calvinische Judenspiegel  (the Calvinistic Jewish Mirror), and on page 33 a comparison is drawn between the two religions in the following droll fashion. [The old German is delightful.] "If I am to say on my honour why I am become a Calvinist, I shall have to confess that the one and only reason which persuaded me was that among all the religions I could find none which agreed so much with Judaism, and its view of life and faith." Lafferty taps into this old schema, whether deliberately or unconsciously. I would argue it is deliberate, given how it surfaces in “Or Little Ducks Each Day,” because Lafferty is so smart, and because he would have known these ideal types like the back of his hand from Hilaire Belloc and many others in the Catholic intellectual tradition. To give just one example, in Belloc’s 1934 biography of Oliver Cromwell, Belloc writes, To the Puritan, Abraham setting out to murder poor Isaac was not a prefiguring symbol of the sacrifice on Calvary, but a lesson in family life. To the Puritan the curse of Meroz worked as efficiently as of old. To the Puritan the Jewish Sabbath—oddly advanced by twenty-four hours—was absolute. The same rule applies to the massacre of all those unfortunate small tribes with the odd Asiatic names; they became household words to those who were Puritan among the English; they were identified with Papists. They were, it will be remembered, exterminated by the order of Jehovah at the hands of His Chosen. Cromwell , p. 43. The fatalistic prejudice that defines the art of Prejudicial Analysis as a satirical target is something Lafferty associates with a detached, business-like WASPish or Judaicized worldview, not with the Catholic and sacramental one. It is outside the Rhineland. And this association becomes weaponized at the end of the story, when Snapjudge is himself taken to be an actual Jew and is pilloried by the Rhineland taverners: “Godfrey, that man over there, I don't like him at all.” (She meant Jim Snapjudge.) “He eyeballed me this afternoon. I felt that he was trying to read me. I felt that he was reading me all wrong. That long nose of his and those bugged-out eyes, they're intolerable. He should do something about them.” “What could he do? Does not Scripture tell us that, by taking thought we cannot add one cubit to our stature?” “I'm not talking about adding a cubit to his stature. I'm talking about him shortening that damned nose and unbugging his eyes . Don't tell me that he can't do it! He can. He's running a chilly fever now and I hope he dies from it. But whatever kind of fever he runs, he's too cool to go in for hating. I'm not. I hate a guy who won't hate. I hate him. I think he's a Jew or an Armenian or a Limey or one of those.” This is a deeply complicated moment to interpret, but here’s my take. Lafferty is certainly making fun of and having fun with the Rhineland prejudices, yet in doing so, he also is dramatizing the fundamental difference between their form of “prejudgment” and Snapjudge’s. The communal, life-affirming prejudice of the Rhineland is certainly nasty, but it targets something even nastier: the dogmatically predictive prejudice of Jonah and Snapjudge. When Snapjudge's predictions are not simply contradicted but openly mocked by the barbecue-sauce prank, he snaps. This is the cognitive dissonance Lafferty attacks: a flawed, unhealthy prejudice that, when challenged, falls apart and turns to murderous malice versus the Catholic throw-the-bum-out . Instead of reassessing his assumptions, Snapjudge moves into the final stage of his own prejudicial analysis: Fate Enforcement. He wants to inhale the blood smell, see the real gun, watch the gore. In that moment, the tyrannical impulse at the heart of his instrumentalizing worldview is laid bare. So how should we understand what the Catholic Rhineland community does when it passes its own form of prejudgment on Snapjudge? When it turns Snapjudge into surrogate Jew? “ That long nose of his and those bugged-out eyes, they're intolerable. He should do something about them.” As unpleasant as this mock-Judaicizing may be for a reader who wants the story to condemn prejudice, Lafferty sees the Rhineland expulsion of Snapjudge as a defense of their sacramental, free-will world against his world of control. They are certainly disordered (lapsed, says Lafferty); he is extremely disordered. Snapjudge is the consequence of a spiritually dead worldview colliding with a living one. He gets to be as dead as that worldview. The story’s really damning verdict comes in the form of the unprejudiced little ducks. The ducks aren’t exemplars to be imitated. As creatures who, in Lafferty’s phrase, “wake up in a new world every day,” they, too, are an equivocal image. They have their innocence, but it is the innocence born of ignorance. It is dumb innocence, a trait Lafferty saw as the disadvantage of not having healthy prejudice. No one here has healthy prejudice, but it is the symptomatic absence . The ducks do not recognize the human categories that overdetermined Snapjudge’s life and thinking. They're happy to be next to his water-logged corpse. This is a hard Lafferty story because it juxtaposes two kinds of non-neutral judgment. On one hand, it affirms the complex, living prejudice that Lafferty likes, the festive, communal, destabilizing world others have called his carnival. On the other, it laughs at the simple-minded state of absolutized non-prejudice that Lafferty either pities or finds comically insufficient, the totalozong analyst or duck. The story warns against prejudice's risks and says, you'd be better a little bit prejudiced if you don't want to be a Snapjudge or a little duck. It is what logicians like to call the exclusive “OR”: a modicum of prejudice or little ducks each day. They did not find his nose too long or his eyes too bugged. They did not find his visage too bloated or purpled. And they did not discover him to be either cold or unlikable. They were unprejudiced little ducks.

A quibble was to him the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world, and was content to lose it. It has been said, that a man of wit could not resist it; that it was a voluntary deviation from sense. But I believe he indulged himself in it, as a practice of the age, to show his reading or his memory, and to divert by producing something unexpected. — Samuel Johnson, Preface to Shakespeare  (1765) THE ANGEL. Yes. You are all now under judgment, in common with the rest of the English speaking peoples. Dont gape at me as if you had never seen an angel before. PROLA. But we never have. THE ANGEL [relaxing] True. Ha ha ha! Well, you thoroughly understand, dont you, that your records are now being looked into with a view to deciding whether you are worth your salt . . . THE ANGEL [reassuring them in a pleasantly offhanded manner] Then you will simply disappear: that is all. You will no longer exist. — George Bernard Shaw, The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles  (1934) Let’s start with the plot. Our main character is Joe Spade, a self-proclaimed flat-footed genius and inventor. Joe visits an anapsychologist (a head-grifter) because he has too much stuff in his head. At the session, Joe breaks the doctor’s glasses, and he is given the advice, “It is not good for Man to be alone.” Believing the doctor has “hit the nail on the noggin,” Joe thinks he needs a business partner. Enter Maurice Maltravers, a down-on-his-luck intellectual whom Joe decides is his twin, calling him “as much like me as two feet in one shoe.” Joe recruits Maurice, who explains that he has been barred from the university computer he needs to finish building his Ultimate Machine. Joe takes him to his own lab, which is a converted horse barn, and shows that the finest calculator in the world is the one in his own head. Now understanding that Maurice is building a nullifier—a machine that can also posit moral and ethical judgments and make philosophical pronouncements—Joe offers his help. Combining Maurice’s theory and Joe’s intuitive engineering, they get the device in a week, in part by letting the machine itself decide its final components. Joe names it the Hog-Belly Honey, while Maurice prefers a Greek name, the Pantophag. At a Trade Fair, the two give a demonstration, a spectacularly successful one. The machine makes candy wrappers thrown at it disappear. It cleans out a man’s stuffed briefcase. It eliminates anything that is “no good for nothing.” Things get serious when Maurice wonders how many people have visited their booth. Being an automatic calculator, Joe gives him the exact figures: nine thousand three hundred fifty-eight have entered, nine thousand two hundred ninety-seven have left, and forty-four remain. Maurice says, “It doesn’t add up.” At that moment, Joe feels “the hair riz up on the back of my neck.” He cottons on to the fact that the machine has been nullifying attendees. Understanding the immediate danger, Joe whispers a warning to Maurice to flee: “Crank the cuckoo... hit the macadam!” But Maurice says, “ Je ne comprends pas ,” and goes back to his sales pitch. Joe escapes alone by jumping onto a departing sky-taxi. Later, from the safety of Mexico, he contacts Maurice via a Voxo communicator, but Maurice is now trapped in a closet by an angry mob. Joe cracks a dark joke, then switches off the device as Maurice make gurgling noises. The story ends with Joe back in town. He says the Hog-Belly Honey was too logical for safety. Now he is looking for a new partner—a genius who “understands me when the scuppers are down.” Despite being much loved by many Lafferty readers, this is one of my least favorite of the well-known Lafferty stories. I’m sure it is because what others delight in—the fun with language—gets in the way of the Lafferty I prefer: the one who uses his own language so strangely and so surprisingly and often opaquely. This connects to something in reading James Joyce. By far my least favorite episode of Ulysses  is “ Nausicaa ,” not only because of how odious I find Gerty MacDowell, the small mind Joyce is sending up. That is only because she isn’t really the main character; her language is the main character. What does Joyce do? He fills the entire episode from margin to margin with stultifying, deadening prose, page after agonizing page of it, parodying women’s magazines and other slack language of the time, giving the reader insight into Gerty through its cracks. If you aren’t a Joyce fan, here is an example: “Gerty MacDowell who was seated near her companions, lost in thought, gazing far away into the distance was, in very truth, as fair a specimen of winsome Irish girlhood as one could wish to see. She was pronounced beautiful by all who knew her though, as folks often said, she was more a Giltrap than a MacDowell. Her figure was slight and graceful, inclining even to fragility but those iron jelloids she had been taking of late had done her a world of good much better than the Widow Welch’s female pills and she was much better of those discharges she used to get and that tired feeling. The waxen pallor of her face was almost spiritual in its ivorylike purity though her rosebud mouth was a genuine Cupid’s bow, Greekly perfect. Her hands were of finely veined alabaster with tapering fingers and as white as lemonjuice and queen of ointments could make them though it was not true that she used to wear kid gloves in bed or take a milk footbath either. Bertha Supple told that once to Edy Boardman, a deliberate lie, when she was black out at daggers drawn with Gerty (the girl chums had of course their little tiffs from time to time like the rest of mortals) and she told her not to let on whatever she did that it was her that told her or she’d never speak to her again.” The sheer mindlessness of “a deliberate lie.” It makes me squirm. It’s dazzling, this being brilliant about stupid, and carried out so heroically, but it puts me in mind of something Randall Jarrell said about Auden’s “ The Shield of Achilles .” Technically masterful but the artistic equivalent of juggling. Joyce can murder clichés in his sleep. The same goes for Lafferty and the voice he ventriloquizes in Joe Spade’s catachrestic language. Joe is a language mangler. Lafferty is not a language mangler. Joe’s brain is full of idioms. Lafferty’s linguistic hygiene is obsessive. Joe is the kind of person who has to twist words a bit, as if that somehow makes it less clichéd. Of course, it is Lafferty twisting up words and phrases for us to get low comedy out of it. The wonderfully poisonous Wyndham Lewis called Joyce’s bluff and got something right when he said all of Joyce’s art is about clichés. Lafferty is the anti-Joyce in this regard. For me, it just doesn’t work. Its nadir is “like I,” Joe using the nominative case first-person singular pronoun instead of the objective case first-person singular pronoun. That is laugh-track stuff. So I’m glad Lafferty does not have too many characters like Joe Spade. While it can amuse, it’s a notch beneath the genius, like watching Groucho in Love Happy . I wouldn’t go as far as Dr. Johnson’s hatred of Shakespeare’s puns, though I do hate moments in Shakespeare like this one from Love’s Labour’s Lost  (Act IV, Scene ii): Holofernes: Via, goodman Dull! thou hast spoken no word all this while. Dull: Nor understood none neither, sir. Holofernes: Allons! we will employ thee. As thou sayest, we will have, if this fadge not, an antique. I beseech you, follow. Nathaniel: Via, goodman Dull! thou hast spoken no word all this while. Holofernes: This is a gift that I have, simple, simple; a foolish extravagant spirit, full of forms, figures, shapes, objects, ideas, apprehensions, motions, revolutions . . . These are begot in the ventricle of memory, nourished in the womb of pia mater, and delivered upon the mellowing of occasion. Johnson was right to be hard on it. On the other hand, most Lafferty readers seem to enjoy the weaponizing of verbal idiocy in "Hog-Belly Honey," and Joe Spade is not Joe Spade without that. He has to process language and re-engineer it through his literal-minded, self-proclaimed genius. So “hit the nail on the head” becomes the wrenched “hit the nail on the noggin and put his toe on the root of my trouble,” which is a multi-level joke in the story—but also an exhausting kind of joke. Lafferty wrings out some dark humor, uses it to show Joe’s profound amorality (partnership as “two necks in one noose”), and finally uses it to drive the plot and the story’s ending, which itself turns on a cliché. Maurice doesn’t get Joe’s mangled “let’s hit the road.” It’s all very clever, but it isn’t the kind of cleverness I appreciate most in Lafferty. I mention it because the over-the-top language only became the main character when Lafferty rewrote the story and goosed it with acton (the ridiculous sky taxi escape). The story’s transformation hinged on three key strategies. First, Lafferty created a fulsome narrative voice through the idiot savant Joe Spade. This turned what was a measured conte philosophique into a rowdy, satirical tall tale. Second, the roles got reversed: the cowardly inventor who escapes in “Pantofag” (Maurice) became the victim, while the pragmatic corporate partner (Orlando) was replaced by the amoral Joe Spade. Finally, the tone swung from philosophical horror and black comedy to fast-paced black humor, where the jokiness was broadened by Joe’s complete lack of remorse and thumping solecisms. Unlike the rewrite, the original reads like a response to Bernard Shaw's The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles (1934), the underread play where Shaw most clearly dramatized his idea that useless people should be eliminated, so I wonder if the material grew out of Lafferty's interest in the Chesterton-Shaw debate. For the full Shaw treatment and "Hog-Belly Honey," the following is worth a watch . In the original, Maurice Maltravers puts it like this, with the incredibly Shavian "that was the whole point of it": And now for the quiet irony of the situation. Roll it around on your tongue, my friend; savor it to the fullest. For the Pantofag was right; that is the whole point of it. It was infallible in its uninhibited decisions. According to its basic principles it obliterated only useless matter. Of the fifty or sixty thousand persons who came to see it perform on those memorable three days, it negated only those five to seven thousand (do you have the final count?) who were absolutely useless. I am surprised that the figure ran so low. I would have set it at about one third of unclassified humanity, and I am delighted to learn that there is some use (God knows what) in a larger percent. Both the original draft and the finished version feature the garbage disposal trope, but in the original, the Pantophag literally functions as a garbage disposal used on people. Two decades after Lafferty wrote the story, Pope John Paul II would take up a related concern in his 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae  ( The Gospel of Life ), warning against what he called the “culture of death,” a mindset and social system that devalues human life, especially the weak, unborn, elderly, and disabled. In the original story, this aspect is far clearer: some people are garbage according to Maltravers. Shaw would have agreed. The original is not half as good a story as the version Lafferty eventually published, yet its Chesterontian affirmation is unmistakable. "Hog-Belly Honey" shows Lafferty, early in his career, padding his sharp elbows to please the market and, in doing so, dulling the story’s original satirical bite.

“Holly Harkel and myself, Vincent Vanhoosier, received funds and permission to record the lore of the Shelni through the intercession of that old correlator John Holmberg. This was unexpected. All lorists have counted John as their worst enemy. ‘After all, we have been at great expense to record the minutiae of pig grunts and the sound of earthworms,’ Holmberg told me, ‘and we have records of squeakings of hundreds of species of orbital rodents. We have veritable libraries of the song and cackle of all birds and pseudo-ornins. Well, let us add the Shelni to our list . . . . You'll have to hurry. They're about gone.’” The Sirionó are one of the most primitive and least numerous of the native tribes of South America. At the time of my study their total population did not exceed 150 persons. — Allan R. Holmberg, Nomads of the Long Bow: The Sirionó of Eastern Bolivia  (1950) One certainty in life is that virtues are closely connected to vices. I sometimes think of the eccentric Caryll Houselander in this regard. She wrote that while all saints are perfected, they remain human, and that some saints would try our patience just as others would suit our disposition. Oliver Goldsmith expressed something similar: “There are some faults so nearly allied to excellence that we can scarce weed out the vice without eradicating the virtue.” Most of us have experienced how even a person’s greatest virtues can become irritating. As Joseph Heller wrote of the Texan in Catch-22 , “The Texan turned out to be good-natured, generous and likable. In three days no one could stand him.” Lafferty’s independent mind is a virtue-vice knot. It’s of his excellences, and it's a reason I get such a kick out of him. A small example: Okla Hannali  is a very great book. At the same time, Lafferty wrote a letter in which he said that, on the whole, the American government had treated the Indians pretty squarely. If someone tries to pitch Okla Hannali to you, don't expect to hear that Lafferty thought that Indian removal was fair. It can be hard to reconcile the fact that Lafferty has both Okla Hannali in him and the belief that the Devil of the Indians is part of a story that is mostly just. Today I want to look at “Ride a Tin Can,” a story about genocide , and offer a wildly speculative reading involving the anthropologist Allan Holmberg and what influence he may have had on Lafferty. Even if Holmberg isn’t present in the text (and I can’t prove he is, though I’ll give some reasons for thinking he might be), the story is relevant to anthropology and fits into a broader conversation. Holmberg is relevant. Lafferty comes out of this one looking good. First, the plot. Our narrator is a folklorist named Vincent Vanhoosier, presenting his final notes on a very sticky business involving the near-extinct Shelni species. He and his colleague, Holly Harkel, receive unexpected funding to document the Shelni’s lore. The arrangement comes from an official named John Holmberg, who views the project with contempt. Holmberg denies that the Shelni have a real culture: “I do not believe that their thumping on tree roots or blowing into jug gourds is music. I do not believe that their singsong is speech any more than the squeaking of doors is speech.” The money for the project comes from the Singing Pig Breakfast Food Company. Vanhoosier describes Holly as having “a heart and soul too big for her dwarfish body,” with a profound empathy that allows her to resemble the creatures she studies—both physically and spiritually. This becomes especially pronounced with the goblin-like Shelni. If Holmberg represents the extreme etic view, Holly is the far end of the emic. Upon their arrival, Holly locates a Shelni den, and she dives "into a hole in the ground head-first, like a gopher." To Vanhoosier's surprise, she communicates with the Shelni guard through a rhyming exchange in their native frog-croak, a language she says is a form of English that "only the pure of ear can understand." The Shelni say they adopted the language because "no one had ever made one for us." Inside the den, Holly and Vanhoosier begin recording the culture of the small, childlike creatures. Music is played on jug-shaped flutes and wooden tines. It creates a haunting sound Vanhoosier describes as "underground fugues full of worms' blood and cool as root cider." And it is filled with a sorrow that seems to emanate from the earth itself. Over two days, the two anthropologists record Shelni folk tales that reflect a deeply fatalistic worldview. One story, "The Shelni Who Lost His Burial Tooth," tells of a dead Shelni who must wander eternally because he lacks the final tooth required to pay the Skokie burial-person. Another, "The Shelni Who Turned into a Tree," is about a foundling who, feeling he doesn't belong, transforms himself into a tree that becomes the living roof of his family's den. A third story, "The Skokie Who Lost His Wife," describes a Shelni being disassembled by a creature looking for his wife's voice in the Shelni's flute music. The project takes a turn when Holly sees an advertisement from their sponsor: "Singing Pig! The Children love it! Nourishing Novelty! . . . Real Meat from Real Goblins! No fat, no bones." The nature of the Shelni's disappearance is then recorded in a last anthropological recording, "The Singing Pigs." The Shelni believe that bell men with music carts come "for love of us" to take them on a joyous free ride. They chant "we can ride a tin can over the sky." Their last story captures a bell man’s "Hey, Ben, what other animal jumps onto the slaughter wagon when you only ring a bell?" The last recording of the Shelni will end with Vanhoosier’s note that "someday a Shelni woman will cry instead of laugh when they take her," and that she will protest, "I'm human." Back in the frame narrative, the bell men arrive with their wagon. Holly, who Vanhoosier notes "had finally come to look like the Shelni," asks Vanhoosier, "Would it be love if they should go and I should stay?" She joins the Shelni, fulfilling the prophecy by weeping great goblin tears as she willingly boards the slaughter wagon. When Vanhoosier confronts the workers, a bell ringer callously tells him he can have her remains back, "if you can tell which ones they are." Left with Holly's bones, Vanhoosier concludes: "Singing Pig Breakfast Food Company, beware! There will be vengeance! It has been told." Andrew Ferguson’s post on the story’s difficult publication history is worth reading. I haven’t read the original 1960 version and don’t know if it has survived. It would be interesting to see how much Lafferty changed it in the 1969 rewrite. I assume the earlier story may still exist in Virginia Kidd’s papers. One of the most difficult aspects of the story is the ambiguity around the Shelni language. Ferguson sums it up this wa y: “In talking to the Shelni—already a momentous task, because of the overwhelming consensus that they have no actual language—Holly learns that the Shelni lacked a language only ‘because no one had ever made one for us.’ In providing the language for these creatures to tell stories they couldn’t otherwise, including stories of their own coming extinction, Holly Harkel acts as a precursor to such SF experimenters as Ursula Le Guin in Always Going Home , or Suzette Haden Elgin’s Native Tongue .” I wonder about this because Lafferty is very slippery on that language point. The Shelni’s statement—“no one had ever made one for us”—can be read in at least three ways: Literal deficiency: The Shelni truly lacked a language until contact with humans. Metaphysical dependence: Shelni being is incomplete; they exist as unspoken goblins until someone names them. Irony: The Shelni repeating what humans say about them (metafictional play)—the idea that language and culture must be bestowed by civilization. Of course, the issue here is the besetting problem of anthropological fieldwork: reception. Can the fieldworker see the object under investigation? Ferguson’s phrasing (Holly provides the language for these creatures to tell stories they couldn’t otherwise) nixes the ambiguity. It makes Holly the linguistic liberator. Maybe Lafferty meant that. Even so, my reading would emphasize Holly as a listener, not a bestower. In the old days, the "Can the Subaltern Speak?" crowd would be all over this. Which takes us to Allan Holmberg (1909–1966). He was an American anthropologist best known for his 1950 monograph, which documented the Sirionó people of eastern Bolivia. He earned his PhD from Yale in 1947 after conducting fieldwork among the Sirionó, and joined the Cornell faculty in 1948, where he directed the Cornell-Peru Project and other applied anthropology efforts until his death in 1966. Nomads of the Long Bow , published by the Smithsonian Institution, was his most significant work. Holmberg’s scholarship has received severe criticism for naive assumptions about indigenous peoples, something now called “Holmberg’s Mistake.” It is hard to name an anthropologist who has taken a harder rap on the knuckles in the past thirty years. To be a little more precise about it, Holmberg’s Mistake is a flawed assumption made that Indigenous peoples of the Americas, particularly the Sirionó of Bolivia, had long existed in an unchanging primitive state, untouched by history or civilization until European contact. In his 1950 study, Holmberg described the Sirionó as “living in a raw state of nature,” implying that the pre-Columbian Americas were sparsely populated wildernesses inhabited by simple hunter-gatherers. Later scholarship in archaeology, anthropology, and environmental history overturned this view, showing that Indigenous societies had developed complex political systems, agriculture, urban centers, and sophisticated landscape management long before Europeans arrived. The term “Holmberg’s Mistake,” popularized by Charles C. Mann in 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus , now stands as a cautionary example of how Eurocentric bias can distort one’s understanding of Indigenous history and agency. And this is where Allan Holmberg might matter to the story. He was precisely the kind of figure Lafferty would have read, and if the fictional Holmberg in "Ride a Tin Can" points to the real one, then Lafferty had his number well before the anthropological community did. "Ride a Tin Can" reads as a correction of Holmberg’s style if not his mistake. Like the Sirionó, the Shelni are without history. Lafferty writes, "there are no Shelni remains going back more than about thirty equivalent years. There are no random lying or fossil Shelni at all, though such remains are common for every other species here." Of the Sirionó, Allen Holmberg wrote, “The Siriono are an anomaly in eastern Bolivia. Widely scattered in isolated pockets of forest land, with a culture strikingly backward in contrast to that of their neighbors, they are probably a remnant of an ancient population that was exterminated, absorbed or engulfed by more-civilized invaders.” Lafferty’s scientist John Holmberg displays ethnographic blindness when he dismisses the Shelni’s singsong as no more than the squeaking of doors. “I do not believe that their singsong is speech any more than the squeaking of doors is speech. We have recorded, by the way, the sound of more than thirty thousand squeaking doors. And we have had worse. Let us have the Shelni, then, if your hearts are set on it. You'll have to hurry. They're about gone.” Lafferty makes this moral satire: the refusal to recognize intelligence and language becomes a rationalization for extermination. The fictional Holmberg’s ethnography enables genocide. The Shelni are industrially processed into canned food. His ethnographic blindness becomes an allegory about how scientific objectivity and bureaucratic detachment can erase the very humanity being studied. In "Ride a Tin Can," it looks to me like Lafferty kit-bashed the kind of writing he found in Myths and Tales of the Southeastern Indians , a book he drew deeply from many times, and combined it with Holmberg’s ethnographic insensitivity. I’ll end with a passage from Holmberg to be read alongside the burial customs of the Shelni:

Lunel, France “ . . . the Coming (the First and Second comings are non-sequential aspects of the same event and are neither first nor second) . . . Part of the difficulty seems to involve the difference between time and eternity . . . the trouble with time is that it is so temporary. In eternity there is no time element. There is no beginning or end, and the trouble with interpreting it is that simultaneously it will have been ended . . .” — Lafferty, Letter to Robert Sirignano "You could enter false worlds that never existed if your reconstructions are too subjective. But you are five correctives to each other in this." — Peter Luna Advanced Lafferty. Today, thoughts about “Bank and Shoal of Time.” Having recently looked at “Rainbird,” Lafferty’s most straightforward piece of writing about time travel, I have been thinking about "Bank and Shoal of Time," not least because it came up in a recent conversation. “Rainbird” says nothing interesting about the metaphysics of time. It says something interesting about the nature of human life as sequenced in time. It reminds the Lafferty reader of the duty to be happy) within historical constraints ( Aurelia ) and to be smart about the opportunity costs. In contrast, “Bank and Shoal” is very much about the metaphysics of time: it's a poetic story that mashes together a half dozen or more ideas about time that appear with great frequency in Lafferty’s work from the mid-1970s onward. But is it really a poetic story? One reason to think so is the role Belloc plays in the story. One should read the Belloc essay " On An Unknown Country " that Lafferty quotes in Section 2 because Lafferty is being so programmatic. His headnotes do many things. One to solicit the reader to consider the original context from which he disembeds his quotations. Belloc writes: “All that can best be expressed in words should be expressed in verse, but verse is a slow thing to create; nay, it is not really created: it is a secretion of the mind, it is a pearl that gathers round some irritant and slowly expresses the very essence of beauty and of desire that has lain long, potential and unexpressed, in the mind of the man who secretes it. God knows that this Unknown Country has been hit off in verse a hundred times.” Poetry and the poetic will be important. And because we are dealing with both poetry and the theology of time, as well as time paradoxes as Lafferty understood them, the story is highly symbolic, and it lacks the neatness of something like the bootstrap paradox in “Rainbird.” It is an open question whether Lafferty worked out a poetics for what he wanted to accomplish from the mid-1970s onward. He clearly thought it was more important than the market. The strongest case for thinking he did not work out a poetics is his opacity. I think we often just lack the conceptual tools to read him. If we had those tools, the continuities would be apparent. We could move more easily from a story like “Rainbird” to one like “Bank and Shoal.” Relevant to this story is something Lafferty wrote in a 1988 letter: “And then there are the paradoxes of Time and Eternity, which hint that the ‘when’ in the questing ‘when will these things be?’ has no meaning. ‘When’ applies to time, and the interstitial coming is the intersection of time and eternity. Every individual door through death enters eternity where one might say that everything is simultaneous, except that one cannot apply simultaneous  (at the same time) to eternity, which is completely beyond time and sequence and which has no ‘before’ or ‘after.’” In "Bank and Shoal," Peter Luna’s death will open a door onto eternity. It will also open one onto time travel for the thirty-year-olds Luna summoned to Moonwick Estate. This is a story about the individual door Lafferty’s refers to in his letter, a thought experiment about the intersection of time and eternity. At the start of the story, Peter Luna is genial and dying. He owns Moonwick Estate in France and has summoned a matched set of at least five experts in theoretical time travel. The ones who show up aren’t quite top-rank time-attempters, but the fact that they show up will change this. Among the five are Henry Kemp, the Time-Reconstruction Man, and Annabella MacBean, the Clotted Dream Woman. The invitation arrives via the mysterious World Courier Service and promises the witnessing of a creeping time-satellite that Luna claims to have built at his estate, a place where “Time is a mulch many meters deep.” Upon arrival at Moonwick Estate, the five experts find themselves in an unusual temporal bubble. Time is under a slow-jog, a state of near stasis where watches stop, and they experience days’ worth of activities (playing tennis, exploring the grounds, and having four good meals) in what Annabella calculates is “the most filled-to-overflowing less-than-three seconds that I ever spent in my life.” This is talky stuff, thick with private symbolism and Lafferty’s big ideas about time. At the estate, Luna and his guests have lengthy discussions about the mechanics of time travel. The central obstacle they have all faced is the same impediment they call the “shoal”—a personal temporal barrier of roughly thirty years. Luna explains to them that “a person . . . cannot make incursion back into any time in which he already lives.” This prevents time-attempters from traveling into their own past. Travel to the future is deemed possible but futile, as one simply “comes to his own hour of death all too soon, and he dies.” The truly great time-travel feat would be to journey into the past before one’s own birth. Hence Luna’s time-satellite. It is designed to achieve this by providing a launch point “beyond the shoals and beyond the interference.” While living within the bubble of slow-jogged time, several of the experts search Moonwick Estate for any physical machine, but they find nothing. Abel Roaring, the Time-is-a-Pile-of-Transparencies Man, grouses that a workable satellite couldn’t be smaller than ten meters in diameter, yet no such device can be found. The strangeness of Moonwick itself is deepened by Lafferty’s use of an external perspective: a local taxi driver who dropped off a guest returns later to show his wife the beautiful big house, but it has vanished. Where it stood is a weed-grown pile of old rubbish. He and another driver who witnessed its appearance earlier agree there is “something dislocated and hellish wrong here.” The mystery sorts out when Peter Luna reveals his true identity. He confirms Henry Kemp’s suspicion that he is that Peter Luna, the one who was “supposed to have died away back in the year 1928.” Luna then makes his big revelation: the current date is indeed that year, and he hasn’t died yet. This is his death day. He has put his final moments into an extreme near time-stasis because, as he puts it, “I’m not in a hurry about dying.” He tells them his death will be the catalyst for their journey—rank superstition made real. “I am the dying cat thrown through the hoop of fire,” he says, “but the hoop of fire is my own aura; and it is the five of you who will fling yourselves through it.” Through his aura, the time-attempters can pass into the past beyond the bank and shoal. The climax is Luna’s death. Luna tells the five, “Oh, you’re inside the satellite. All of us are. The entire estate of Moonwick is a time-satellite.” By coming to the estate, the five experts were transported inside the device. They arrived in 1928, decades before their births and safely beyond their personal shoals. “The ‘Road to Yesterday’ is wide open to you,” Luna says. At the moment of his death (which he announces with a kind of pleasure by saying, “The clock has stopped”) Luna’s aura flares forth, a quivering and quaking loop, a circular image of eternity. The aura expands. The five guests step through it. It collapses. Lafferty writes, “Peter Luna was dead.” The five “happy-sad time-achievers” then proceed “with lively step down the ‘Road to Yesterday.’” Where to start? With the title, I suppose. It is an allusion to Macbeth , Act 1, Scene 7. The scene matters because what is at stake for Macbeth is the nature of judgment and eternity, and questions about risk. Specifically, in the bank-and-shoal thought, Macbeth weighs murdering King Duncan. He measures ambition against conscience, and he decides that, because life is brief and fragile, just a narrow “bank and shoal” between the infinite seas of birth and the afterlife, he will do it. He will murder Duncan and gain the crown, even if the act brings him judgment and damnation. To skip a step ahead, the integrity of judgment is central to "Bank and Shoal," so it might be worth keeping in mind the Macbeth passage. Shakespeare influences the theological problem Lafferty sets up with Peter, the time-attempted, and his version of the shoal. When Macbeth stands on the bank and shoal of time, the stakes are immense. It’s the edge earthly power and eternal ruin. Macbeth knows that killing Duncan could make him king but also destroy his soul and unravel the moral order that binds him to loyalty and humanity. Now flip all that because Lafferty does. He makes Peter Luna a self-sacrificial figure who uses his death to pass the crown of time travel to the five time-attempters. Peter is an interesting character, with certainly more than one game being played on his name. As the guardian of the doorway to time, he is a type of Peter, the porter at the gate. And as a man named Luna, he is tied to the moon, with all that symbol’s temporal associations of time and tide, as well as Lafferty’s watery, moonlit oceanic . There is also something Christlike in the logic of what happens in the story: the narrow path to time travel occurs through the aura the time-attempters must pass. This is not to say that Peter Luna is a Christ-figure (this is not the blood of Christ), but it is to say that the sacrificial logic of passing through a person into another temporal regime is Christological in pattern. That’s all of St. Paul, so it is thematically significant to a large number of subelements in the story: a person gates time and eternity. One last thing. This story is beautiful and brilliant, yet it has much going against it: foremost is its cast, and how they lay out information, then the deep roots of all that happens in the Whole Lafferty . Perhaps the easiest way to get past this first shoal is to bite the bullet. Think through the first Britannica  entry that Lafferty quotes, the one at the beginning of Section 3. One has to get clear on the five. The story starts with a dramatis personae , but that is something of a red herring. The real dramatis personae found the Britannica entry, because the characters are living exemplars of its pedantic definition of time, forming a matched set five “four-color” Lafferty personalities with some key dualities. Henry Kemp and Abel Roaring are the attempters who understand the physical experience of time. For them, time is a medium that can be built or archaeologically excavated from “remembering-transparencies,” similar to how archaeology works in The Elliptical Grave (1977/1989) . This fits with the process philosophy aspect in the entry of time as being metaphysically ultimate. Then there is Annabella MacBean, with her clotted dreams, and Ethan Farquharson (his name is a literary allusion), who says that intuition is the key. They’re all about the psychic experience; what can seem to be the illusory view of time as a subjective, mental construct. Rowena Charteris challenges the one-way flow assumption with her theory of quantum displacement. It is Peter Luna himself who provides the practical mechanism by creating a localized field (the slow-jog) that illustrates how time’s flow is relative to the observer’s velocity: everyone in the story is relative to Peter Luna's slow-jog, his last five seconds of life. He has made them relative to him, to his temporal order, the order of Moonwick as he dies, that will separate when the five pass through his aura. The aspect of Moonwick, the physical structure, the un-satellite time traveling doublet of Moonwick (it is only an estate, a bit of geography in in France) will then be a corpse, just like the dead body Peter’s lawyer finds; and like a corpse it will decay and leave rubbishy matter. Together, the quintet synthesizes philosophical and physical principles. What is abstract in the Britannica  definition is operationalized in time travel. And interestingly, all their equations, despite the different interpretations of the data, point to the same metaphysical reality. [As an aside, there is a fun joke here that another five that might be about the Institute for Impure Science: "There are at least five rather furtive and sleazy persons already on the time-roads."] With Peter, the five time-attempters, and the five seconds, we arrive at some of the deeper elements in the story. Ideas like aeviternity . On my reading, we have more than a three-tiered cosmology in the story, but we need a three-tiered rig even to get started. In short, most human existence in the story is bound to the default temporal realm, a linear path where people are trapped unidirectionally. Here is time’s arrow. As it moves, the shoal moves with it. To escape, one cannot sail directly into the past (one could not leave the harbor) but must first reach an aeviternal analogue that lifts one over it. One needs a time satellite like Moonwick Estate. Moonwick is this a little like an observation plateau. It exists between ordinary time and true eternity. From its location, a quantum push through a specific gateway (Peter Luna’s dying aura) becomes possible. It propels the characters beyond the temporally limiting shoal: the aura of Peter Luna is released as he enters eternity. The homeliest way to put all that is by way of the great Junior Johnson, moonshine runner turned racing legend. The fearless Johnson was the first American driver to discover how to use another car’s slipstream (or “draft”) to his advantage. He would tuck in close behind a competitor to reduce drag, then he would slingshot past the other guy. Here, the car’s drag is like Peter’s aura and the five are like Junior Johnson. Junior Johnson uses his discovery of slipstream. Moonwick Estate also allows the characters to experience something like a Boethian simultaneous view, accessing all history at once from a summit. There is more than a little Boetius in this, accounting for God’s foreknowledge and man’s free will . The time satellite is a satellite because it exists outside ordinary time (it is slow-jogged to Peter's being/aeon) and outside eternity, on the cusp of the aeviternal, where sequence can be experienced. The benefits of slipstream will arrive with Peter Luna's death and the hoop-of-fire aura. Peter has brought the five so close to his aeon that the five time-attempters can "draft" into time travel, right through the aeon/hoop. Luna says, "They have it topologically backwards though. I am the dying cat thrown through the hoop of fire, but the hoop of fire is my own aura; and it is the five of you who will fling yourselves through it. And I am the slave killed so that the traveler may step through his expanded dying aura and be back in time for the length of the slave's life. Yes, it is the rankest of superstitions. Cannot you find it likeable in me?” But why would Lafferty create this kind of plot? I think it has to do with his Catholic views of particular and universal judgment, something he spent a lot of time thinking about. For either of the judgments to be consistent with ethical monotheism, one could not occupy the same point in the sequence at the same moment. This might seem non-intuitive, but I’ll try to set it out as clearly as I can. Again, aeviternity is the issue. It is the middle condition between time and eternity: angels and blessed souls exist here. Events have logical sequence but not temporal succession. There is order without passing moments. (Read this post for a deeper dive into the issues.) That order ( ordo rerum ad finem ) is necessary for divine providence and judgment, because every creature’s moral history must take place in a determinate sequence. It can be seen whole by God the Father in the particular judgment and judged publicly by the Son in the universal judgment (a wrinkle on this in a moment). That is Boethius’ summit. Peter Luna enforces that rule, the one that no one can occupy the same time twice. It dramatizes a deep Thomistic principle. The shoal of time (the span of one’s own lived years that cannot be revisited) is a metaphysical firewall preserving the ordered chain of acts by which a person is knowable and judgeable. To cross back into that span would transform sequence into non-sequence, destroying the intelligible order of cause, choice, and consequence on which both morality and reality depend. For the same reason no one can occupy the same point while traveling in the past. The slow-jog field at Moonwick, where moments nearly stop, is for this reason a quasi-aeviternal state between temporal change and eternal stillness. Peter Luna is thoroughgoingly Thomistic when he says that his guests must leap beyond their own shoal but never into it. In Thomistic terms, the shoal marks the particularized boundaries between human temporality and aeviternal order: again, violating it would not merely break time but jeopardize ordo iudicii , the divine order of judgment itself. This is, of course, my distinctly Thomistic reading of the story (“It’s Gothic with the bright sun shining on it. All other Gothic is between haunted twilight and lightning-riven midnight”). Yet there’s also one Origenist in the group. I am never quite sure what to do with Lafferty’s occasional flirtations with Origen and universal salvation (he usually treats them as thought experiments), but they can’t be ignored. Origen is here at Moonwick Estate, and he does seem to get a hearing: a clear instance of what Gene Wolfe meant when he said that fragments of patrology mattered to the fiction: “Oh, Peter, this is part of the main show,” Annabella insisted. “It's at least the first act of it. I think it's a full show, five or seven acts at least, and at the end of each of them we die and are then reborn on a more vasty plane. But there aren't any skimpy acts in our main show; surely the first act isn't; and it's criminal for us to skimp any part of it. We must range forward and backward through the act we are living in; we must learn every direction and dimension of it. We have an obligation to understand and to explore, in every way. Life is made up of this compacted emotion and experience and happiness, and if we cut ourselves off from any dimension of it then we live the less. We must unclot it and open it all up. The ‘Road to Yesterday’ must be one of the opened roads, or we are the less for it.” “It's rather good cake,” Peter Luna said as he took a forkful of his own Death-Day Cake. I’ll wrap up by saying something about 1928. It’s the only year mentioned in the story, and that is quite important. It’s a magical year in the Whole Lafferty. Peter Luna dies at the moment Lafferty sets as the passage away from his generation’s childhood. In the Green Tree  materials, the year 1928 holds profound significance. Remember that its first volume is titled  My Heart Leaps Up: 1920–1928 , a title that alludes to Wordsworth’s “ Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood ” (1807). Back to Belloc’s and the poetic. As with Green Tree , allusions to Wordsworth’s “Intimations Ode” help solve a few puzzles. One of the stranger bypaths in the story is the passage on babies and time travel. Wordsworth, of course, imagines a spiritual pre-existence in which “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.” Peter Luna is thoroughly Wordsworthian—if not in method, then certainly in outcome—by giving this idea a literal, cosmological explanation. He says the youngest children, especially those still in the womb, indulge in time travel. Their out-of-body experiences become a tangible version of the Ode’s “Heaven lies about us in our infancy!” This visionary access is then lost. In reading this, I could not help but think of Wordsworth’s line, “shades of the prison-house begin to close / Upon the growing Boy.” Lafferty treats this spiritual fading as the quantifiable concept of the shoal, the barrier of personal-life inertia that widens with age. It turns the “visionary gleam” into something that can be mapped. As a result, the nostalgic longing of the “Intimations Ode” looks a great deal like the attempters’ concrete quest to get behind this barrier, to go “nearer to our well-springs.” This is probably the largest part of what time travel in the story is about, its “Road to Yesterday.” This takes us back to Belloc's "On An Unknown Country" and what it asserts about poetry. It is the story’s private poetry. All that to say, the year 1928 is a Wordsworthian flashpoint in Lafferty. It is the culmination of the children’s shared identity at Crucifixion as children. It is the start of their diverging destinies in the upcoming decade of upheaval. Completing eighth grade also bound them permanently as the “Class of ’28,” giving them cohesion and belonging even as they scattered to different schools and futures. Economically, 1928 foreshadowed opportunity amid impending crisis, and Lafferty gives it special attention as an important year in his work. Alfred F. Pitchblende knows that a downturn is coming; it allows him and his step-family to prepare. Young investors like James Tyrone use that insight to buy cheaply in oil and profit as prices rebound during the Depression. Academically and personally, the year is one of transitions. There are new schools, new friendships, and first romances. That tested loyalties and broadened horizons, bringing the Class of ’28 closer together, making them more a clot of time. In sum, 1928 was an ending and a beginning: the end of Lafferty’s imagined hedged childhood circle and the starting gun for the period of grasshoppers and wild honey. Peter Luna creates his own Class of ’28. While the children of Green Tree are unknowingly headed toward Flatland, Peter Luna’s class moves in the other direction. Rowena Charteris grumps to the other Britannica entry, “But why do you say it is a one-way flow?” You can sense how far from Flatland we are, what the other side of the shoal might be, what an astonishing gift Peter Luna's aura is, when Lafferty writes of Moonwick: “And the great rolling outdoors of the estate was about a square kilometer in area. It was in the fork of two branches of a small river that rolled chortling the mere twelve kilometers into the Gulf of Lions of the blue Mediterranean. The third and north boundary of the Moonwick Estate was a line of steep and sudden cliffs about fifty meters high.”

“Nor Limestone Islands” is the hit single of Lafferty’s Fortean stories. It has a sticky title. Within that heterogeneous group, it is reader-friendly. It is centripetally Fortean. In these ways, it is like “Fall of Pebble Stones.” Both stories point like the Hand from Heaven to printed lines of Fort’s  The Book of the Damned  (1919). Lafferty seemed to tire of using Fort in this way. His preferred method became reimagining Fort. He then raids Charles Fort for ideas, twisting Fort into strange Laffertian shapes, the way we see in Where Have You Been, Saldaliotis? That is superior Lafferty. What he will not do is write Fortean stories as if he were baptizing Fort’s damned facts in the manner of Charles Fort's Catholic amanuensis. Especially of the unchosen. Surely catnip for Lafferty. It is unfortunate that critical discussion about this well-known story is so thin. The story shows up in the weakly assembled  The Best of R. A. Lafferty , where it receives an appreciative, albeit uninformative, note from Michael Bishop, who was a stalwart champion of Lafferty’s reputation. Bishop then makes the comparison that some readers cannot help but make. Whenever “Nor Limestone Islands” is mentioned, some person clears a throat and exclaims, “Laputa!” Lo! a floating island in Lafferty, and there is a floating island in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels . Fumbling for a handhold, they reach for Jonathan Swift rather than for the broader Western tradition of floating islands and the whole world of wonder stories—from those about Aeolia in Greek myth to Herodotus on Chemmis in Egypt. This puzzles me. After all, in “Nor Limestone Islands,” Lafferty writes a swaggering wonder tale. Swift does not write a wonder tale despite what old cartoons might lead us to believe. If Lafferty had Swift in mind—and it is far from obvious that he did—he erred. But he didn't err. I want to pause on this point for a moment, just to do my small part in keeping the shadow of Swift's odious Laputa from falling across “Nor Limestone Islands.” Swift’s Laputa is ruled by hapless intellectuals. Through the Laputans, Swift cocks a snook at the Royal Society, with its politics and its scientists, antiquarians, mathematicians, cognoscenti, and philosophers. Swift thought they rode hobbyhorses hard and were detached from the ordinary, including the reality of faith. Hence, the withering passage about the dog in Gulliver’s Travels . It parodies a real experiment performed by Robert Hooke (1635-1703). The following is from Hooke's grisly handwritten report about opening the thorax of a dog. Hooke kept the animal alive by using bellows to direct air into its lungs: Swift's merciless satire: . . . my conductor led me into a room where a great physician resided, who was famous for curing that disease, by contrary operations from the same instrument. He had a large pair of bellows, with a long slender muzzle of ivory. This he conveyed eight inches up the anus, and drawing in the wind, he affirmed he could make the guts as lank as a dried bladder. But when the disease was more stubborn and violent, he let in the muzzle while the bellows were full of wind, which he discharged into the body of the patient; then withdrew the instrument to replenish it, clapping his thumb strongly against the orifice of the fundament; and this being repeated three or four times, the adventitious wind would rush out, bringing the noxious along with it, (like water put into a pump), and the patient recovered. I saw him try both experiments upon a dog, but could not discern any effect from the former. After the latter the animal was ready to burst, and made so violent a discharge as was very offensive to me and my companions. The dog died on the spot, and we left the doctor endeavouring to recover him, by the same operation. These are Laputans. There is no wonder on that flying island. They are so consumed by mathematics, astronomy, and music that servants must physically flap them to draw their attention. Below the island lies unlucky Balnibarbi, where impractical scientific schemes ruin agriculture and daily life. Swift savages a range of targets in Gulliver’s adventure here, including the misuse of natural knowledge and political power. Laputa represents an interesting moment in literature confronting the rationalizing and instrumentalist tendencies of modernity, which is indirectly relevant to Lafferty’s story. Swift thinks that the empirical, rational project of the Royal Society is itself a kind of fantasy. By satirizing it as a bogus wonder tale, he parodies modern credulity—and he does so to deflate scientific pretension. It is one of the ways in which Swift is a complicated figure who demystifies. He cuts the throats of those he dislikes, and he cuts his own hand on the blood-slick knife in his stabbing, something that always made his fellows in the Anglican hierarchy squirm. By contrast, Lafferty’s flying island is apocalyptic in the original sense. It unveils to restore wonder. Or at least it tries to. "Nor Limestone Islands" is not one of my favorite Lafferty stories. But it is a great example of how Lafferty often deals with disenchantment, here with doe-eyed clarity, in a way that other later Fortean stories I'm thinking of more demanding and more rewarding stories such as "Bequest of Wings" ) do not. More about this after the summary. We begin with a city commission hearing where a straight-out-of-Greek-mythology limestone salesman wants to win a contract. He is a “deep-chested” man covered in rock dust and wearing winged sandals. He was bare-chested (and colossally deep-chested). He had only a little shoulder jacket above, and a folded drape below. On his feet he had the crepida or Hermes-sandals, made of buckskin apparently: a silly affectation. He was darkly burnt in skin and hair, but the roots of his hair and of his skin indicated that he was blond in both. He was golden-bearded, but the beard (and in fact the whole man) was covered with chalk-dust or rock-dust. The man was sweaty, and he smelled. His was a composite smell of limestone and edged bronze and goats and clover and honey and ozone and lentils and sour milk and dung and strong cheese. from "Hermes," Harper's Dictionary of Classical Antiquity (1896) What he offers is too good to be true: he will deliver and set 300 tons of high-quality marble-limestone within an hour for the price of 300 dollars or 300 bushels of cracked corn. His firm’s location is his firm, a place called Stutzamutza. He says the country is currently about three miles away. The mayor and the commissioners reject his bid. They view him as a disreputable saucerian and scoff at his claims of a mobile country. During the same hearing, a photographer named Miss Phosphor McCabe shows that she believes in what the salesman is offering. She butts in because she is present on her own business: to petition the city for a permit to build a 30-acre “Pink Pagoda” on a hill inherited from her grandfather. McCabe visits the salesman’s country and takes many photos for a photographic article titled “With Camera and Canoe on Sky-High Stutzamutza.” Lafferty uses free indirect narration to lock in her perceptions, and we experience Stutzamutza through her photographic art, being referred to the various plates that would appear in the article, should it be published, which it won’t be. These include the floating limestone island’s intense whiteness, with its Final Falls, a waterfall that drops water up to 60,000 feet into the open air, turning into mist or hail: But all lesser views are forgotten when one sees the waterfalls tumbling in the sunlight. And the most wonderful of all of them is Final Falls. Oh to watch it fall clear off Stutzamutza (see plate XXII), to see it fall into practically endless space, thirty thousand feet, sixty thousand feet, turning into mist, into sleet or snow or rain or hail depending on the sort of day it is, to see the miles-long rainbow of it extending to the vanishing point so far below your feet! The Stutzamutzans are deep-breasted and lusty. While they trade quarried stone for soil and grain and use thirteen-foot-long trumpets and thunder-drums, it is paradise itself. At one point, McCabe sees fossilized Zeuglodons in the island's quarries. Despite her documentation, the editor of Heritage Geographical Magazine decides not to publish the article. Such a place is an impossibility. Yet the islands are corroborated by other fragments that Lafferty stitches into the story. Hank Fairday, a retired weather observer, says that meteorologists use the code name “Whales in the Sky” to track these floating stone landmasses on radar. They’re an open secret. They occasionally settle in unfrequented regions. Cajuns have long traded with and even intermarried with the islanders. The story ends with the completion of Phosphor McCabe’s Pink Pagoda. She says it was built by detaching 300,000-ton blocks of pink limestone from a floating island positioned directly above the hill. The city officials either can’t see or ignore the massive structure, and a skeptical “enemy” places an “egg-of-doubt stone” inscribed with a poem mocking such anomalies atop the pagoda. McCabe plans to remove it once her traveling friends return. Why did Lafferty spin the story from this page in Charles Fort’s The Book of the Damned. Probably Fort’s impatience in calling out circular reasoning. The Fortean world of possibility, and by extension the miraculous, is sealed off by fiat. The enthymemic argument, which starts with an E proposition (“no limestone is in the sky”), is formally valid, but the truth of the universal negation of its first premise is taken for granted. That poisons the only affirmative conclusion. This apparently caught Lafferty’s attention because it was how he thought so many people err. They prematurely close off the extent of the possible with the no and the not . To go deeper, I’m going to introduce a distinction that helps me think about what is going on in this part of Lafferty. It is a way of pulling apart the incredibly difficult and endlessly debated topic of disenchantment in modernity. Rather than thinking in terms of one-dimensional disenchantment, we can think about figural moments of disenchantment in Lafferty as being a duple movement, which either moment coming first or second depending on the story. We have de-divinizing/re-divinizing and un-magicking/magicking. Let’s set aside all the complexity of the current debate about disenchantment and whether current ideological formations are merely alternative forms of enchantment. Those an interesting and often convincing arguments. (It is related to what Swift thought about Hooke and the Royal Society as a fantasy project and why Swift created Laputa.) The first part first: de-divinization. I take it from Friedrich Schiller’s well-known idea of “de-divinization” (German Entgötterung ). Schiller talks about it in various places, but it shows up most clearly in his 1788 poem “ Die Götter Griechenlands ” (“The Gods of Greece”). There, he writes about a world that has been stripped of gods, a point relevant to the salesman figure in “Nor Limestone Islands” with its Hermes-like figure at the beginning. What Schiller wrote several centuries ago is something almost everyone is familiar with now. Nature used to feel alive, sacred, and meaning-filled, and we can see this across the sea of time by looking at the Greek imagination. Modern life experiences the de-divinized world as a place of dead matter. Schiller calls it “ entgötterte Natur ” (nature “de-godded” / de-divinized): a world no longer populated by presences that make it emotionally and spiritually deep-chested. In Lafferty’s story, it is the lower world, the expanse beneath Stutzamutza. Lafferty is not Schillerian, however, because Schiller sees Christianity and modern rational/scientific explanation as being problems. Lafferty sees the current de-divinizing as being attendant on the de-Christianizing of the world. Either way, the old mythic, aesthetic intimacy with the world collapses into a colder, more abstract outlook. Schiller’s Flatland-like Entgötterung language is an ancestor to the later sociological talk of “disenchantment,” but—and this is the point I want to emphasize—in Schiller, it is fundamentally a poetic-cultural mourning for the loss of a divinized, enchanted relation to nature and meaning. Lafferty uses this Entgötterung as a Schillerian space to displace his ideas about sacramentality ignored or denied. The person who is most associated with the disenchantment thesis is of course the German sociologist Max Weber. Weber’s “disenchantment” ( Entzauberung ) could be translated as un-magicking. It’s essentially a sociological-historical diagnosis: modernity is characterized by rationalization. There is a lot of bureaucracy, calculation, and the belief that, in principle, the world can be mastered through technical means rather than magic or mystery. Enchantment recedes not mainly because people feel less “poetically” connected, but because social institutions and dominant ways of explaining and controlling have changed. To be absolutely crude about it, Schiller is concerned with the loss of a divinized experience of nature (and treats art/poetry as a refuge where something can survive of that), while Weber describes an epochal shift in how societies organize knowledge and power, a “de-magicking” of the world that can leave people spiritually stranded even if they still long for meaning. With the ideas of de-divinizing ( Entgötterung ) and de-magicking ( Entzauberung) at hand, let’s look at “Nor Limestone Islands.” The story starts on a Weberian note of un-magicking of society. We are in a city meeting where bureaucracy, technical calculation, and rationalized control rule. As the story progresses, we see that the deeper concern is with Lafferty’s version of Schillerian de-divinization. Because the world has been “de-godded,” nature is treated the way it is. Lafferty has a word for Weberian people. They are the city commissioners and the “unfolk” who govern the modern world. They do all they can to further disenchantment because what really matters are formal bids, reputable addresses, economy, and dignity. When the limestone salesman offers a miraculous bargain, it is rejected because he disrupts the city's bureaucratic order. To these officials, the salesman is a “crank,” and his floating country is “disreputable.” Lafferty’s depiction of this “un-magicked” world is primarily comedic; controlling the world through rationalized systems is, in itself, ridiculous and leaves them getting a worse deal on limestone. The more ambitious side of Lafferty’s project lies in his response to Schillerian Entgötterung . As Lafferty does in the Fortean stories, he uses the cranks to return to a world that feels alive and in-spirited, where the physical and the divine exist in intimate unity. In “Nor Limestone Islands,” this shows up in the contrast between the inert world of geology and the “living stones” of Stutzamutza. The limestone salesman is a re-divinizing presence; he smells of honey, ozone, and dung, embodying a sacramental intersection of the celestial and the earthly. In the Schillerian displaced space, he is a Hermes figure (Hermes being the god of the stone heap, of the herms, and of the hermeneutic understanding of writing on stone). When Lafferty starts the story by quoting his much-loved Harper’s on statuary falling from the sky, he tells the reader what he is up to: it is the vertical passage of the divine into the mortal. It was regarded as an art imparted to men by the gods; for such is the thought expressed in the assertion that the earliest statues fell from heaven — “Statuaria Ars; Sculpture,” Harper's Dictionary of Classical Literature and Antiquities That verticality is a refiguration of sacramentality, which becomes present when Phosphor McCabe travels to the island and participates in its economy. All this de-divinizing and un-magicking peaks in the “Unfolk Ballad” and the construction of the Pink Pagoda, and how they are part of the same structure. Although I don’t think it quite works, and that Lafferty will find a way to make it work in other Fortean stories, the ballad is an image of the de-divinized mind, with all its “I will nots.” Why it doesn’t quite work (for me at least) is that we shouldn’t believe in absolute nonsense, and the items in the “Unfolk Ballad” are mostly crackpottery. Now, I want to be careful here because I see what Lafferty is doing. He gives us two clues for unlocking the “Unfolk Ballad” in the passage by Dr. Johnson, which says that a man is not on his oath when doing lapidary work. In other words, Lafferty is saying: here I speak in a spiritual sense that in a literal sense would break an oath because lapidary is not the thing of oaths. The other is Lafferty telling the reader to look closer: "Look closely at that little stone ere we leave it. Are you sure that you have correctly noted the shape of it? Then a still smaller stone to be set in, here where there seems to be an empty little gap. It's a mere quotation 'In Lapidary Inscription a Man is not upon Oath.'" Here is a curious fact. There is only one lapidary inscription in the story, and the rest of the lapilla are metaphors. The actual inscription is on the egg of doubt, the “Unfolk Ballad,” atop the pink pagoda: "I will not trow two-headed calves," Say never-seens, and also haves. "I'll not believe a hollow earth," Say skepticals of doubtful birth. "I'll not concede Atlantis you, Nor yet Lemuria or Mu, Nor woodsmen in northwestern lands, Nor bandy-legg'd saucerians, Nor ancient technologic myth, Nor charm of timeless megalith. I will not credit Whales that fly, Nor Limestone Islands in in the Sky" Richard Harlan (1796-1843) and Richard Owen (1804-1892) Perhaps two additional points. Both digress from the de-divinizing vs demagicking argument. First, there is an amusing miniature drama within "Nor Limestone Islands" with the Zeuglodon fossil . Zeuglodon is the obsolete name the British anatomist Richard Owen proposed in 1839 after re-examining fossil whale material that the American naturalist Richard Harlan had already described in 1834 as Basilosaurus. It was an academic correction. Harlan had mistaken the animal for a gigantic marine reptile (hence “king lizard”), but Owen figured out from its double-rooted teeth that it was a mammal. This meant it was an early whale. Owen was right about the animal’s identity, but the conventions of scientific priority meant Harlan’s earlier name, Basilosaurus, remained official, and Zeuglodon hung around for decades in popular and semi-technical usage. Lafferty’s joke seems to be that the floating limestone islands drift and drop stone from the sky, seeding the earth with fossils, something appropriate for a wastebasket taxon. The last point is about the Pink Pagoda itself. It isn’t an argument, just an intuition: beyond being a counterimage of the Black Pagoda, it reads to me like Lafferty literalizing Proverbs 24:3: "Through wisdom is a house built; and by understanding it is established."

Maybe Jones is on my mind, so a short note on something fun. Early on, when Lafferty was considering how he would use the Watkin material that would eventually find its home in the Men Who Knew Everything  sequence, he seems to have considered using Watkin as the basis for a Maybe Jones novel. There is a note that reads, “The Color-Chapter Sequence from Watkin’s The Bow in the Clouds ,” followed by some additional sketching and then a portrait of Jones. Jones was somehow going to serve as a vehicle for the Watkin metaphysical schema. He is called “the man of a kaleidoscope,” and then Lafferty shows us why, laying color upon color in a single breathless paragraph. Jones’s hair is straw-yellow (Art), shot through with purple vetch (the Positive Sciences), red russet vetch (Religion), yellow safflower thistle (Art again), and verdigris-sage (Metaphysics, the blue-green of sky and sea), with a garnish-orange fringe beard noted in the margin (Sex, the intermediate fire between beauty and supernatural love). His eyes shift from fire-blue (Metaphysics) to green (Life) to red (Religion), depending on the angle. His skin is space-burned dark brown (Matter, the ultra-violet darkness at the edge of being), but slashed with glowing sarcomatous patches (Mysticism, the ultra-red that shines beyond visible light). When he opens his mouth, you get specter-white teeth (the undivided Divine Light itself) against a hungry hell-red gullet (Religion at its most consuming). The idea did not get off the ground, but one can see what is going on: no single color or metaphysical band can contain this version of Maybe Jones. He is warm and cool, dark and bright, natural and alien. It was a variation on the Watkin conceit that one could intimate a full metaphysical reality by teasing out bands of metaphysical being, the notion that runs through TMWKE  from “Mud Violet” until the series breaks with Watkin’s schema. This seems like a good place for the notes on how the short story "Space Chantey" changed when it became the novel:

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

“With the Jews the women remain always a little better; and this is a people that also unfolds slightly on further acquaintance and also disappoints; for while we are discovering new virtue in them, we are finding that much of their assumed worth is made out of air.” — Carl Curlee, Hell to Pay Hell To Pay is an abandoned Lafferty novel that Lafferty started at some point but didn’t record, then picked up again in 1959 and 1961. Apparently, it was to be a retelling of the Faust legend. What makes it interesting, in terms of early Lafferty, is the Jewish elements and Lafferty's use of the name Baruch M. Ball. As I’ve written about before, the President in Three Armageddons that corresponds to when the Holocaust took place is Bernard Mannes Baruch . One cannot prove that Baruch M. Ball is a variant of Baruch M. Ball, but I think it is likely. Two chapters survive. Notes show that the novel was to have Willy Wagoner as a reporter and Carl Curlee as an investigator. The primary antagonist would be Baruch M. Ball (associated with the name "Ba'al"), a millionaire described as "the devil." But here is the interesting twist. Further notes indicate that Prentice Pilkington is the "real devil" and the actual murderer, while politician Hugh Fast and Baruch Ball were to be suspects and one assumes red herrings. This looks to me to be an example of what I have called Lafferty’s early virtuous antisemitism that ran alongside his skepticism of the Holocaust before he encountered Holocaust denial materials in the 1970s. Hell to Pay was planned to be approximately 20 chapters and 60,000 words. What survives tells us that Willy Wagoner is a reporter who relies on an anonymous "Source" that leaves him accurate tips in his pockets. He gets a note on brown paper that tells him of a secret preliminary interview at the home of Hugh Fast between Fast and Baruch M. Ball. The note suggests that Ball will make a life-changing proposition to Fast and advises Willy to plant a recording device in the "Cup Room" of the Fast estate. So, Willy begins researching Ball, and he finds that Ball is a wealthy newcomer to the state with over $86,000 in a checking account, a walk-in vault, and extensive property holdings. Yet Ball’s business background remains a mystery. Willy also investigates the Fast household and learns from a waitress named Katie Collier that Fast is an empty politician born into wealth. Willy contacts a character named Lucy Lucastro, a servant at the Fast home known as Lucy the Lark. She agrees to meet him to discuss a favor. Chapter One ends. In Chapter Two, Willy meets Carl Curlee, and they discuss the city's social and political dynamics. Curlee says that Ball has been heavily backing Colen Callagy, Hugh Fast’s brother-in-law, for governor. They find Lucy at a movie theater, where she describes Baruch Ball as "snakeish" with hands like ice. Lucy says that Ball and Fast have scheduled a meeting for the following night, and she agrees to help Willy and Carl record the meeting, telling them how to enter the house and which room to bug. This material then concludes with Curlee back in his room, sketching portraits of the key players, Fast, his wife Margaret, Ball, Pilkington, and Lucy, to analyze their characters and potential roles in the unfolding situation. And the rest is lost.

Completed in September 1977 and first published in 1995, "Happening in Chosky Bottoms" is an intriguing Lafferty story. On one hand, we have the inexplicable nature of the Slew-Foot (Quick-Lout) people. On the other hand, we see the over-rationalization of the central murder plot involving Malcom. In a nutshell, the story follows a towering Slew-Foot youth nicknamed Chalky, who joins Lost Haven Consolidated High School’s football team and turns it into an unstoppable force. His supernatural strength, quickness, and intelligence make him a local hero, but his success fuels the jealousy of former star quarterback Malcom Schermerhorn. After Chalky quits the team, a series of animal mutilations are discovered around the swampy Chosky Bottoms. Next, two children are mutilated. Fear spreads into panic, and suspicion falls on Chalky. In the final confrontation, Chalky is shot and sinks into the quicksand—only to rise again. Overcome with terror during this, Malcolm dies of fright. His secret is revealed: he had been orchestrating the killings while disguising himself as a hairy “monster”: Chalky. With Malcom’s guilt confirmed, the townsfolk accept the truth. Chalky—who can run 100 miles a day—then departs, setting his sights on a professional football career. Chalky is a “hairy ghost,” unstoppable on the football field. But when he is shot, swallowed by quicksand, and presumed dead, he rises again with an otherworldly sheen. His strange resurrection is rationalized as a matter of mica attaching to his fur: “It’s the mica,” Crescent Harvestman said matter-of-factly. “There’s always been specks and little sheets of mica in the quicksand slime, and it gathers in pockets.” This explains nothing at all. Lafferty is playing a game here. He has a character who rationalizes the supernatural with a flimsy materialist explanation.  Chalky’s “glorified flesh” is deflated by geology. This is how the entire story works. After the wild violence and the numinous, readers are left with a few pages of limp rationalization. On a first reading, it might feel anticlimactic. While there’s much to explore, I want to focus on this aspect. Michael Saler’s concept of animistic reason in As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality (2012) sheds light on what Lafferty is doing in "Happening at Chosky Bottoms." In Chapter 3, Saler considers Sherlock Holmes and the interplay of reason and imagination in Doyle’s portrayal of the detective. He writes that Holmes “. . . expanded the definition of rationality beyond a narrow, means-ends instrumentalism to include the imagination.” Saler’s argument is worth quoting at length for its relevance to Lafferty’s story: Sherlock Holmes became a modern icon partly because he utilized reason in a manner magical and adventurous, rather than in the purely instrumental fashion that many contemporaries feared was the stultifying characteristic of the age. Science and art, which had been associated from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment, as well as in the writings of early romantics such as Goethe, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, appeared to be severed by the mid-nineteenth century. Holmes restored their vital interchange, rendering science creative and art enlightening. He expanded the definition of rationality beyond a narrow, means-ends instrumentalism to include the imagination, resulting in the more commodious form of ‘animistic reason’ that imbued its objects with meaning. It was through his animistic reason that Holmes the private detective bested professional detectives on cases, as he often boasted. (In one case he confides to Watson that ‘Inspector Gregory, to whom the case has been committed, is an extremely competent officer. Were he but gifted with imagination he might rise to great heights in his profession.’) Holmes solved cases by relating seemingly discrete facts to a more encompassing and meaningful configuration, whose integuments were derived from a combination of rigorous observation, precise logic, and lively imagination. Saler’s point is that Doyle makes the incomprehensible legible without dispelling its wonder. No matter how much we enjoy the terror of the hound that haunts the Baskervilles, Holmes is there to explain.   He imposes a higher, rationalistic magic that dissolves the supernatural. He’s just that much of a genius. This dynamic reveals something important about what happens in "Happening at Chosky Bottoms." Lafferty’s little town of Lost Haven has no Sherlock Holmes. The residents try to apply Holmesian logic to the monstrous events—especially the bloody dismemberments—but fail to unmask the real killer until Chalky supernaturally resolves the mystery. After an explosively Sam Peckinpah -esque climax, in which Chalky is repeatedly shot and then swallowed by quicksand, he miraculously rises. What follows is that  madcap scene of mysticism and rationalization, where the characters struggle to make sense of everything, much like a failed exposition at the end of an episode of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?   They want there to be an animistic reason. They need an explanation that ties every clue together in a satisfying causal chain. Here is one character near the end: "Oh, sure,” Coach Goodbeaver said. “You can get several thousand pounds of pull with one of those. It will pull a quarter-mile length of barbed wire clear of the ground. It would easily pull a dog apart, or a kid goat, or the children. That is what chewed up the two posts it was anchored to in the corral of the barnyard where the kid goat was killed. There are probably a couple of sets of trees around here that are chewed up a little bit too. I should have known from those two posts what happened.” And a little while after: There were cameras in the “nest” too. There was a little cylinder of methane gas that might have been used to bubble through swamp water to create long-hovering glows of swamp fire. The ape-suit soaked in such methane-water would probably glow in the dark and create a Saturday Night Specter. And it would give an illuminated sort of photo. There were other things there. “I guess it is tied to Malcom,” deputy sheriff Al Moss said. “But, Chalky, to tell the truth I had my heart set on tearing you apart as the monster.” In a story that over-explains, much remains unexplained—that’s the point. Lafferty leads us to the edge of deeper mysteries: Who are Chalky’s people? How does he stretch so well? Why do his stories change every time he tells them? We get no tidy explanation for how he can run!  or how he “lives in a slightly different world from our own.” In the face of this, the eagerness with which the characters rationalize the modus operandi of Malcom’s crimes becomes black comedy. Animistic reason will not get the job done. Here, in Lost Haven (the same setting as The Reefs of Earth ), the clues won’t line up to neatly explain away the hound of the Baskervilles: there simply isn't a rational solution to take the mystery out of Chalky. There is the supernatural remainder. The real mysteries—the ones that demand deeper thought—go ignored. How do we understand the Malcom and Chalky mini-drama of the ape costume and the man-costume? We have clues but no answers. We know what Malcom did with the hooks: he tore a goat and children apart, but we never find out what Quick-Louts do with them. One of [Chalky's people] used to come to the Bait Shop in Lost Haven to buy fishhooks of the biggest size (six inches across the hook) for a dollar each. These were deep-sea hooks, but Henry Stone, who ran the Bait Shop, stocked a few of them especially for the Quick-Louts. “I don't know what they hook with them,” Henry always said, confessing his ignorance. “Whales, I guess. Yeah, Wagoner County whales, I bet.” These very large fishhooks were the only things that any of the Quick-Louts ever bought, the only commerce that they ever carried on. So, back to the ending. The townsfolk remain transfixed by the spectacle, unable to see beyond it. It’s like watching Chalky play football and only noticing the football. In overlooking the truly mysterious, they fail to see the world as it is. What might seem like a narrative weakness is, in fact, the story’s raison d’être.  A telling clue comes early on: we’re told football isn’t the most important thing in the world, yet the story treats it as if it is. Which means that in talking about football, Lafferty is also, in his own way, talking about the most important things: death, resurrection, and mystery. Current notes:

One of Lafferty’s deeper-cut poems is “Ancient Sorceries,” written a year before he retired from writing. It is a The Men Who Knew Everything/In a Green Tree  sonnet, rooted in his private symbol system. The whole poem proceeds by association, and one could follow those associative lines for a long time. Human beings have an older, more primitive brother: childish but powerful, and known under many names in myth, religion, monstrosity, divinity, and folklore. This is Austro, but also Finnegan as teras  and Neanderthal. The poem suggests that we keep forgetting him, but that he keeps returning, and one thinks of how many of Lafferty’s stories serve as reminders of this. He is terrifying and funny, stupid and brilliant, brutal and imaginative. Through old myths, magic, and religion, human culture keeps retelling him. In doing so, we reveal ourselves as strange creators too: comic and magical creatures making stories about the universe. The poem also gathers several of Lafferty’s recurrent symbols. There is the story of the dragon's teeth and the Argo myth, in which Jason was tasked by King Aeëtes to sow them. There are Tyre, Tarshish, and Punt, which appear so often and so oddly in his fiction as places from which inexplicable and usually untrustworthy treasures arrive. There is the unusual image of Pandora’s box refigured through hay reaped and stacked on wharves, bolting Greek myth onto Galatians 6:7 and concentrating both in an image most contemporary people have lost entirely: bales of hay, piled up as essential cargo in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the great age of hay scows and schooners, now under a cloud of amnesia. There is also the multimedia line, concerned with ontology and communications, Lafferty's great of the mid-seventies, with Austro from the early seventies working on Rocky McCrocky. That is displaced Finnegan making art on cave walls as if he were Jason sowing dragon's teeth; it is “Dorg"; and it is the cave of creation in  Three Armageddons,  and, more generally, primordial art that is never really behind us because it is all happening at once. Finally, there are Edmund Weakfish and the Putty Dwarf, two of Lafferty’s most interesting images of human corruption and failure. I tend to think of Edmund Weakfish as an epistemic anti-Christ, a weak fish, and the Putty Dwarf as a figure of aphar , the clay from which Adam came, de-spirited and pulling toward what Lafferty calls hylicon.

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

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