"Panic Flight" is an early, unpublished Lafferty story that satirizes science fiction before Lafferty cast his lot in with it. The only comments on the story speculate that it failed to sell because the market was unwilling to be twitted by an unknown upstart. More likely, the story did not sell because it is oddly unbalanced and not very good. It wants to do too much with too little. On the one hand, there is the lampooning of science fiction language. This sits at the front of the story and is what most readers will remember. On the other hand, there is what seems to be Lafferty’s real point: to say something more serious about utopianism, mortality, and clichés. The whole thing centers on clichés. And clichés are a problem not merely because they are tired, but because of how they convey what is unbearably dead about the past as it persists in the present. One should probably distinguish between an aesthetic and a moral gag reflex. The aesthetic offense is what the story conveys most obviously: science fiction language can be dumb because it sometimes reupholsters the mundane. Not always , but often. There is also a moral reaction to cliché, which responds to something genuinely sinister about the way it distances one from the ground of meaning. Of course, the two are bound up with each other, but there remains a difference between being annoyed by a hackneyed formulation and being disturbed by the way a thought-form, or a kind of language virus, obscures matters of great importance and masks the fact that one is surrounded by the living dead. Lafferty hangs too much of his story on repulsion at the surface features of language, when it is clearly the latter that troubles him. Think of Ouden saying, “Every dull thing you do, every cliché you utter, you come closer to me,” and of the Astrobe state as a utopian cliché. This is cliché as privation—that is to say, cliché as evil. Both the story setup and the story form are simple. We have a dialogue set in the future between two friends, John and Peter, at the exclusive Earth Club. Humanity has achieved effective immortality and interstellar travel. With that comes the psychological pressure of a lifespan measured in centuries. People cope by relying on medical modifications. They pop Contentment Pills. They take Variety Boosters. Like people at a methadone clinic, they need to shoot up Cliché-Toleration. Most citizens have also received an artificial “Interplanetation Impulse” to encourage space exploration. Lafferty writes, “No man can have everything, Peter,” said John, “and we have had more than most: Health, Contentment (Do you still use those old Acme Contentment Pills, Peter? Most of the fellows have switched to B7), Long Life (interminable I should say: we are well rid of the prospect of what they used to call the Last Great Adventure), Relief from Worry. We have an endless enjoyment of endless variety. I have to get a Variety Booster in the morning. I had nearly forgotten.” Peter is an exception to all this, an ironic one. He is always on the move between star systems because he can’t stand the repetition of clichés in human language. He has a pathological sensitivity to them. Over hundreds of years, they wear one down. Much of the dialogue describes Peter’s history of abandoning planets after a cliché makes staying intolerable. At one point, he left an orbital near Procyon, and at another, a farm on Rigel. The moment someone uses a cliché or an ancestral idiom, Peter bolts. In "Hog-Belly Honey," Lafferty plays with clichés in a way that is somewhat related to what is going on here. There, he does not use Ameliorated Translation as the vehicle for disguising clichés, but instead twists clichés, as dead metaphors, into mixed metaphors. I’ve written elsewhere about why I dislike that move in the story, and my response to the idea of Ameliorated Translation here is essentially the same. Peter has zero tolerance for clichés, whether in their original or ameliorated form. Long ago, he maxed out the safe dosage of his Cliché-Toleration shots and other psychological stabilizers. His mind can no longer filter out the “crawling horrors” of dead language: "So I had, John, till one of my co-workers dropped the phrase ‘Sklero-cephalic hippikos discernment’ which was in the Ancestral, before the Ameliorating Translation, 'Hardheaded horse sense.'" "'Now is the time to differentiate the Meganthropoi from the Micanthropoi’ he said. Which is to say, before the Ameliorating, ‘to separate the men from the boys.'" The story's ending is predictable. As Peter prepares to leave for a new property on planet BQ965Y, John reassures him about the move. Then he says it, the ameliorated translation: “It’s a nice place for a sabbatical, but I wouldn’t want to live there.” Peter becomes physically ill and leaves the club in a state of panic. He doesn’t even wait for his scheduled morning departure. Instead, he takes his panic flight on a midnight transport. “I was there once myself, Peter,” said John. “It's a nice place for a Sabbatical, but I wouldn't want to live there.” Peter rose retching and left the Earth Club in panic. He did not go to BQ965Y in the morning. He left that very night on the midnight express. As I said, this is a light, unsuccessful story. What makes it interesting to me is its background, which shows that it is not just a satire of science-fiction language, despite its surface play. There is also a satire of society here, with the argument that a culture reliant on extreme self-modification to attain immortality inevitably flees reality. The superficiality of that existence is revealed not only by Peter’s panic flight but also by the universal dependence on augmentations to cope with endless longevity. Peter’s reaction shows the story’s main point: everyone, not just Peter, is taking flight, trading reality, with all its discomfort and death, for a meretricious comfort. That will become the logic of Cosmopolis. That makes the story about spiritual impoverishment right under its jokey Ameliorated Translation surface. In “The Poor Man’s Guide to Hell,” Lafferty makes his clearest statement about spiritual poverty and its relation to the real poverty of Cathead. He writes, “the new poverty was manufactured by the new Utopians,” and that “poverty is not Hell. But poverty without saving grace and humor is Hell. The supreme cruelty of our own time has been the imposition by the rich of their own humorlessness upon the poor.” There is no old poverty in “Panic Flight.” Everything is affluent and manufactured, yet the poverty of spirit is everywhere in "Panic Flight." The characters show no wit. It is all the author's. They sat on the pavilion of Earth Club, one of the thousand-odd exclusive country clubs of that simple but elegant suburb of Megapolis. It was in the conversational cool of the evening, that magic hundred hours of companionship and charm that precedes the soft coming of the night . . . They watched the younger swimmers, and drank Dragons' Blood as they talked. “Panic Flight” is an odd story. Even at the point where we first see Lafferty writing his own recognizably science fiction, the major ideas are already in place. What he lacks, at this stage, is a clear sense of where to put them, and so they surface on the scenic flat. Because they are handled so lightly, almost as throwaways, the story can read as little more than a satire of the science-fiction genre, rather than also as an early installment in Lafferty’s ongoing critique of a culture in which much of culture is locked into the trashed-life principle. There are few Lafferty stories I would call genuine apprentice pieces. This is one of them. What he is doing here runs counter to the instincts that would later define his work, and the result is best described as a mismatch. Ferguson has argued that science fiction was not yet prepared for the kind of upstart critique of its own language that Lafferty was attempting. I would add that Lafferty himself was not yet prepared to mount the frontal assault he would later grow into. When Past Master  appeared in 1968, it brought a previously backgrounded idea to the fore by lodging it in Ouden’s maw.

Following my request for a review of the materials, the University of Tulsa’s McFarlin Special Collections has updated its archival record: https://utulsa.as.atlas-sys.com/subjects/3870 https://utulsa.as.atlas-sys.com/subjects/4411 A word about this. The photograph of the Holocaust denial letter in the Antisemitism section was not reproduced from the University of Tulsa Special Collections, but comes from another source. Lafferty’s carbon of the letter is archived at Tulsa. Should you want to request a copy of the carbon, see the second link. The letter is included on the blog solely for purposes of scholarly analysis, criticism, and historical context. The discussion forms part of a broader examination of Lafferty scholarship, specifically addressing how the limited circulation and obscurity of this document and the Lafferty archive have affected prior academic interpretations. The letter is reproduced in full to ensure accuracy and transparency, and to avoid selective quotation that could introduce bias or misrepresent the structure, rhetoric, or argumentative methods employed. Full reproduction allows readers to evaluate the document in its entirety. The McFarlin update chose not to quote the Holocaust denial itself or to quote Lafferty denying the Jewish Holocaust, instead grouping the letter under a broader category labeled “Holocaust Denial.” I believe the archive should make a clear distinction between Lafferty’s ownership of Holocaust-denial materials and Lafferty himself denying the Holocaust, and that distinction should be explicit in the record. That is one reason I include the entire letter. It is why I pursued having the archive relabeled. Without the letter on this site, Lafferty scholars would be uninformed about an important context for understanding his view of 20th-century history. It should be clear that the use of Lafferty’s letter is intended to be transformative, incorporating critical commentary and contextual analysis rather than reproducing the work for its original purpose. Hence, the arguments about how it has affected—and continues to affect—thinking about Lafferty, including in recent publications. As far as I know, no one I asked in my antisemitism article six months ago joined me in this, but I am glad it is documented. I continue to think that academic integrity is a major problem in the Lafferty community.

Some years ago, being with a camping party in the mountains, I returned from a solitary ramble to find everyone engaged in a ferocious metaphysical dispute. The corpus of the dispute was a squirrel—a live squirrel supposed to be clinging to one side of a tree-trunk; while over against the tree's opposite side a human being was imagined to stand. This human witness tries to get sight of the squirrel by moving rapidly round the tree, but no matter how fast he goes, the squirrel moves as fast in the opposite direction, and always keeps the tree between himself and the man, so that never a glimpse of him is caught. The resultant metaphysical problem now is this: does the man go round the squirrel or not? He goes round the tree, sure enough, and the squirrel is on the tree; but does he go round the squirrel? In the unlimited leisure of the wilderness, discussion had been worn threadbare. Everyone had taken sides, and was obstinate; and the numbers on both sides were even. Each side, when I appeared, therefore appealed to me to make it a majority. Mindful of the scholastic adage that whenever you meet a contradiction you must make a distinction, I immediately sought and found one, as follows: "Which party is right," I said, "depends on what you practically mean by 'going round' the squirrel. If you mean passing from the north of him to the east, then to the south, then to the west, and then to the north of him again, obviously the man does go round him, for he occupies these successive positions. But if on the contrary you mean being first in front of him, then on the right of him, then behind him, then on his left, and finally in front again, it is quite as obvious that the man fails to go round him, for by the compensating movements the squirrel makes, he keeps his belly turned towards the man all the time, and his back turned away. Make the distinction, and there is no occasion for any farther dispute. You are both right and both wrong according as you conceive the verb 'to go round' in one practical fashion or the other."—William James, What Pragmatism Means (1907) You seem to posit a real world, but that is doubtful. There isn't any reality except the various consensus realities. And no two persons belong to quite the same consensus. So the world that a person lives in is largely a world that he has fictionalized, whether he is a fictioneer by trade or not. Whatever frustrations we find in the cantankerous combo-world are partly from our inability to shape things the way we want to.—R. A. Lafferty to Robert Sirignano I’m fascinated by the philosophical problem of underdetermination. The philosophers who most interest me try to tackle it, and it’s one of the reasons Lafferty fascinates me. Lafferty has been seen as a post-modernist, or a post-post-modernist, but neither of those are categories that I use when trying to work through interpretative questions. Partly this is the old joke that from the modernism you choose, you get the postmodernism you deserve. More seriously, it's a complete refusal to give a license to petitio principii. You set up a problem where the historical has already won and become absolute or has been vaporized into nihilism, something Leo Strauss understood in  Natural Right and History  (1950), when he saw that without a transhistorical standard of reason, historicism collapses into nihilism. Pick one or the other, says modernity. I think this matters for Lafferty because a.) he wants to transcend the historical, b.) he rejects nihilism ("Flatland," "the trashed-life premise," "heroic tedium," etc.), and c., he intensifies the problem of underdetermination. Consider what Lafferty says to Sirignano. We inhabit a “cantankerous combo-world” stitched from overlapping consensus realities, which means there is no "real world." Now consider the many essays that affirm a mind-independent World grounded in God, the "Real World" to which fiction and life ultimately answer, as when he wrote to Sheryl Smith, "What's this stuff about art not supposed to be didactic? I buy you geography and arithmetic books and you chew them up and don't learn what's in them. Then I put the stuff in SF parables, and you say it's fine but it doesn't teach anything. Sure it's supposeta. SF is the literature of ideas. Its whole idea is to serve as a shoe-horn to get ideas into funny-shaed head." Both the cantankerous-combo worlds and the Real World somehow coexist for him without contradiction ( Lafferty's use of Worlds ). In the venerable tradition of getting rid of a contradiction with a distinction, I'm going to see out some possibilities. Assumptions: (a) a real, mind-independent created order exists; (b) reason can know some truths about God from creation; (c) revelation is binding and truth is one (no “true for me” vs “true absolutely”). Level distinction (phenomenology vs. metaphysics): P1: Human experience is always mediated by consensus (“worlds we fictionalize”). P2: Mediation doesn’t entail non-existence of a mind-independent reality. ∴ The quote speaks of how  we encounter; PRIME states what ultimately is. This distinguishes how we experience from what exists. Epistemic anti-realism + ontic realism (critical realism). P1: Our knowledge is theory/consensus-laden and underdetermined. P2: A real, independent World exists (PRIME). ∴ We’re fallible knowers of a real World—both claims stand. This treats us as fallible knowers of a real world. Domain restriction (social vs. cosmic). P1: Many “realities” in the quote = socially constructed orders (law, money, norms). P2: Catholic metaphysics concerns creation’s being under God. ∴ Social worlds are plural; creation/PRIME is singular. This situates many social worlds inside one created order. Analogical predication of “world.” P1: “World” can mean experiential lifeworld; also the total created order. P2: Catholicism uses analogical language for being. ∴ “No reality but consensus worlds” = true analogically; PRIME = true properly. This treats “world” analogically in a way standard to Catholic metaphysics. Noumenal/phenomenal reading. P1: Phenomenal reality = intersubjective, scheme-bound. P2: Noumenal/PRIME = mind-independent, God-grounded. ∴ Two standpoints, no contradiction. This keeps intersubjective appearances distinct from a mind-independent order without declaring the latter unknowable in principle.  Keep natural knowledge of being and of God. Thomistic participation. P1: Created things participate in Being ( ipsum esse subsistens as source). P2: Human minds “form” secondary worlds by intention/language. ∴ Consensus worlds = participations/forms within the one World (PRIME). This explains created being as participation in the act of Being. Sacramental mediation. P1: Signs and rituals constitute shared consensus spaces. P2: Sacraments truly mediate the one World of grace. ∴ Plural mediations don’t negate the unity and objectivity of PRIME. This acknowledges multiple mediations while preserving one reality of grace. Eschatological unveiling (now/not-yet). P1: In history, appearances are fractured by competing consensuses. P2: At the eschaton, reality (PRIME) is fully disclosed. ∴ Both are true at different stages of the same story. This sees partial grasp now and fuller disclosure later without denying present truth. Peircean/pragmatist convergence. P1: Truth is what inquiry would converge on under ideal communal conditions. P2: Revelation/deposit orients that convergence toward PRIME. ∴ “Consensus worlds” describe our current fragments; PRIME names the limit. This treats communal convergence as an aid to truth rather than a replacement for correspondence and revelation. Guardrail: Let correspondence to reality and revelation remain norming. Hinge realism. P1: All knowing operates within language-games/hinge commitments (consensus). P2: The Catholic hinge aims at and is responsible to reality (PRIME). ∴ Framework plurality + ontological accountability cohere. This locates reasoning within frameworks that reality and revelation can correct. Do not seal frameworks off from correction. Two-city model (mixed orders). P1: The earthly city = overlapping consensuses; the City of God = reality under grace. P2: Lives straddle both orders. ∴ Apparent clash is an overlap of distinct but interpenetrating polities.  This frames life within overlapping earthly and heavenly orders. Indexical truth vs. absolute truth. P1: “There isn’t any reality except consensuses” = true for-us-as-subjects . P2: “PRIME is the World” = true absolutely  (God’s vantage). ∴ Double-aspect truth, not double-truth: indexed vs. absolute. This recognizes perspective in knowing while maintaining the unity of truth. Guardrail: Reject any “double-truth.” Theistic idealism (Augustinian). P1: Created reality exists as ideas in the Divine intellect. P2: Human consensuses are finite participations/representations of that reality. ∴ No mind-independent created  reality apart from minds—and yet PRIME is maximally real in God. This grounds intelligibility in the Divine intellect while retaining real extra-mental creatures. Preserve real created substances. Formal/material/final causes split. P1: Consensus supplies forms  and interpretations (formal causes) of experience. P2: PRIME supplies the act of being  and teleology (material/final in God’s order). ∴ Different causal registers; no conflict. This analyzes experience through multiple causes consistent with Aristotelian-Thomist thought. Underdetermination + revelation as tie-breaker. P1: Multiple conceptual schemes fit the same data (underdetermination). P2: Revelation/deposit provides non-empirical constraints fixing metaphysical commitment to PRIME. ∴ Many consensus worlds; one binding metaphysical anchor. This allows many live theories while letting revelation decisively orient fundamentals. Rhetorical/ironic persona (literary–philosophical). P1: Lafferty sometimes stages voices to dramatize positions. P2: A staged phenomenological claim can coexist with a personal realist confession. ∴ The two utterances function at different rhetorical levels. This treats authorial stance as a device with no doctrinal entailments. Participatory ontology of truth. P1: Humans co-make “worlds” responsibly or irresponsibly. P2: Truth is conformance of intellect to the real (PRIME) and to the Good. ∴ World-making is judged by, and can align with, PRIME. This understands truth as the intellect’s conformity to reality within moral responsibility. Mystery-bracketing (apophatic guardrail). P1: Our speech about the World is analogical and limited (cantankerousness = limits). P2: The deposit of faith asserts real truths while acknowledging divine incomprehensibility. ∴ Plural consensuses reflect finitude; PRIME remains affirmed without overreach. This affirms true claims while acknowledging divine incomprehensibility Double-coding of “fictionalization.” P1: “Fictionalize” = select/compose from facts (not fabricate ex nihilo). P2: Composition presupposes a factical field grounded in PRIME. ∴ The quote describes curation, not denial, of reality. This treats fictionalization as selection and composition that presuppose real facts. Moral realism with descriptive pluralism. P1: Descriptions of the world vary by consensus (pluralism). P2: Moral/metaphysical facts (Good/God/ends) are objective. ∴ Plural descriptions under a single moral-metaphysical order. This admits many descriptions while upholding an objective moral order. Continued .

"LAUGHING KELLY' Black comedy about the burials of several Lafferty characters. The titular Kelly won’t go quietly. His laughter continues from the grave. Here one thinks of The Devil is Dead and its "Diabolique." " A STRINGLESS-FIDDLE NOTION" This nonsense verse tells the story of an inventor. He creates an impossible stringless fiddle and uses its music to bake waffles. He and his partners open a successful restaurant. Lafferty having fun. "SYLVESTER" Surreal and melancholy. It's about a man whose brain is so large that he must pull his "backbrain" behind him on a sled. Lafferty was fascinated by the backbrain. The poem focuses on the fellow's divided existence and his wish to be whole. I set it to an English music hall sound because it is so parodically melancholic. It could be about Finnegan. Remember what Lafferty says about that . "TALE OF A TAIL" A story poem where the natural order is reversed. A dog's tail is the dominant part. After being severed, it survives while the dog dies. The tail grows a new dog, a cycle it has repeated many times. "ALL IN THE BOUNDLESS OCEAN" A sf comedy about a man named Roy who swaps minds with his goldfish. His new fish mate masterminds their escape from the bowl by psychically convincing Roy's wife to flush them down the drain. Then begins the journey through the sewers to the ocean. The course of true love never did run smooth. A reworking of the unpublished shorty story “Goldfish.” "INTERNAL DOCTOR HARVEY LEE" One of Lafferty's great pieces of light verse. About a doctor who shrinks himself to work inside his patients. This is the little "he." "He" becomes a celebrated artist by painting murals on internal organs, but his artistic pride takes a hit when he discovers even older, superior paintings inside a patient's kidney. "FROM ALPHA WORLD OF KAPTEIN'S STAR" This is horror/comedy fun in which the residents of a town are transformed into green, alligator-tailed monsters by a free soup sample. Behind it all is a boy scientist problem child who tries to cash in. When the cure is too expensive, they enact some small-town justice. Space-age lounge music. "MEDICAL MALPRACTICE MEDLEY" I've included two versions of this because I really like it. It's a grim and funny satire about the detached Dr. O'Toole, whose negligence leads to the suffering and death of a woman's children. The mother goes from grief to a cynical indifference that mirrors the doctor's own. My second favorite of the collection, just behind the "Little Willy Verses." “ LITTLE WILLY VERSES ” These are short, gruesome verses, a lost bit of Americana that Lafferty loved. Each stanza details a violent act committed by Willy. There is usually an understated or inappropriate reaction from an adult.

On August 8, 1971, a book by Lafferty received a rare notice in The New York Times Book Review . The review drew attention to the heady blend of “politics, poetry, [and] magic” in The Flame Is Green  and noted the bright splashes of humor threaded through its moral symbolism. Unfortunately, the final two volumes of the Cosucin tetralogy remain unpublished. Taken as a whole, the Cosucin novels constitute a major work, worthy of being set alongside Argo  and Green Tree . Until that triangle is fully available to all readers, Lafferty’s ambition as a writer won't be apprehended by many people. The first Coscuin book follows Dana Coscuin, an Irishman recruited in 1845 into the service of the mysterious Count Cyril (sometimes styled Count Cyril Prasinos). Dana heads from Bantry Bay to Hendaye and into the Carlist hills in the first part of his adventure, moving between the Carlist “Black” traditionalists and the parasitic “Red” blight while groping toward an as-yet unformulated “Green Revolution.” After an entanglement with Elena Prado y Bosca—the “Muerte de Boscaje,” death-witch of the Red—he joins a select company of eccentric revolutionaries. This includes his mentor Malandrino Brume, the giant Kemper Gruenland, and the Sardinian Tancredi Cima. Their campaign carries them through the upheavals of 1848, moving from Paris to Kraków. There, Dana marries the brilliant revolutionary Catherine Dembinska. She is brutally murdered by Dana’s arch-nemesis, Ifreann Chortovitch, the Son of the Devil, and the father of Papadiabolus I and II from The Devil is Dead . Dana tracks Ifreann into the mountains. In a wonderfully written duel, he kills him and receives a single copper penny as his final reward, though later Coscuin material complicates just how final that killing is: " Prendko , prendko , quickly, quickly!” the winter raven screamed, and Dana was onto the split second when the chalk ledge crumbled under the heavy forward-shifting foot of Ifreann. The big creature slipped on one foot and came down within reach, and Dana drove the rapier point under the leather lorica or breast shield. The big creature came all the way down, and the point went all the way through, protruding from the back. Ifreann lay at Dana’s feet now. He rattled in his throat, he gushed dark blood, he twitched; then he was silent and motionless. Today I want to think a little about the meaning of Black Revolution and Carlism, and ask why Lafferty himself was thinking about it in the 1960s and early 1970s. One of the curiosities of The Flame Is Green  is that it takes place in a lull between the first and second Carlist Wars of the 19th century in Spain, setting up a choice for Dana. Will Dana be sucked into the inflexibly traditionalist Black Revolution, which Lafferty respects but sees as, in some ways, unsuited to the times? The Carlist cause is one of reaction. Will he betray both the Black and the Green Revolution? Dana fell philosophically. That is bad. He fell carnally. That is also bad . . . Dana Coscuin tried to have it both ways. He couldn’t. He should have stood firm in the first statement [that there is a God]; that has enough flesh in it, but not flesh alone. Elena was not of ordinary flesh. She was of flesh gone absolutely fetishistic, and with no place for any other central thing . . . He traded off his soul philosophically, and adhered, by silent assent to the last statement rather than the first. What will it even mean for Dana to become a revolutionary of the Green Revolution? One of the most important aspects of The Flame Is Green is that it says goodbye to the Black Revolution. The Black Revolution of Spain is Lafferty’s depiction of the most principled outright rejection of liberalism, and the Black Revolution is, in this case, Carlism. Lafferty’s Grolier set depicted Carlism as “ Reaction Triumphant in the Latin States .” Its pages are certainly worth reading as a quick primer for anyone who wants to read or reread The Flame Is Green , as is the Carlist material in the Catholic Encyclopedia ’s entry on Spain . That would give a reader some context for what Lafferty is doing. Suffice it to say that Carlism is a traditionalist, legitimist political movement. It was rooted in a dynastic dispute over the succession to the Spanish throne after 1833. If you want the absolutely bone-simple version: after 1833, a dynastic dispute broke out because Ferdinand VII changed the succession rules (the 1830 Pragmatic Sanction) to allow his daughter Isabella to inherit. That stole the throne from his brother Don Carlos. Carlists backed Don Carlos as the legitimate heir and, over time, the movement became a broader traditionalist rejection of liberal constitutionalism in favor of a Catholic monarchist order that defended tradition and regional fueros . Its strongest support was concentrated in particular regions and rural milieus , not uniformly across Spain. Carlism itself persisted into the 20th century and still existed when Lafferty’s The Flame Is Green  appeared in 1971, though by then it was fragmented and far from its earlier mass strength. Under Franco it survived in divided currents. This included small pro-regime and oppositional strands. In the late Franco and early transition period, the Carlist Party (founded 1970) adopted a left-wing, self-management socialist line very much at odds with the anti-socialist Lafferty. Franco’s death in 1975 opened a new phase marked by legalization (1977), reorganization, fragmentation, and long-term decline in broad influence. Carlism was being discussed by Catholics in the 1960s. It might have been on Lafferty's mind because the topic sometimes came up in the 1960s pages of National Review . Lafferty read The National Review , and he submitted a poem to it . William F. Buckley Jr.'s first language was Spanish. He taught Spanish for a while at Yale and had been a CIA agent at the Mexico City station. Brent Bozell self-identified as a Carlist and moved to Spain. Hilaire Belloc’s spiritual son, the brilliant and unusual Frederick D. Wilhelmsen , thought of himself as a Carlist. All were influential Catholic thinkers in their own ways. In Citizen of Rome (1980), Wilhelmsen gives a sense of how Carlism was being thought about. He calls Carlism a “lyrically Catholic” and quixotic traditionalist movement, and he sees it as the last vital remnant of medieval Christendom in the West, which fits Lafferty's depiction of Carlist reaction a s quixotic. It was centered in the Spanish province of Navarre. Wilhemsen thinks it is epitomized by the red-bereted Requeté volunteers who fought in the 1936 “Crusade” against Communism. Like Belloc, Wilhelmsen has a philosophical view of the Crusades. Finally, for Wilhelmsen, Carlism has two central planks: an uncompromising allegiance to the “Sovereignty of Christ the King” (Christ the King was also the name of Lafferty’s parish) and the legitimate monarchical line, in opposition to the liberal state. In this regard, one should remember the sermon of the Black Pope in The Flame Is Green : “For the Carlist Thing is the King Thing, the Bold Thing, the Sky Thing. It is the tree with some of its branches in our hills and with its roots in Heaven. Every King is really a King Charles, since Charles means King. But no King will rule us on Earth unless he is in the image of the King Himself.” I would not be surprised if Lafferty had read Wilhelmsen on Carlism in National Review . For Wilhelmsen, the Carlist movement—because Carlism, for him, is not over—is a profound rejection of modern secularism and rationalism. This polical philosophy is Wilhemsen’s. It favors an organic, familial political order and defends local liberties ( fueros ) against the centralized power of the modern state. As he later wrote in Citizen of Rome , its “hatred for Nazi paganism was only matched by its hatred for Communist atheism,” which positioned Carlism as a model of “Incarnational Politics,” a sacral way of life in which the Cross is a Sword and political action is an extension of religious faith. In this way, Carlism remained alive in the 1960s as an intellectual struggle. Lafferty rejects it by having Dana move toward the Green Revolution. For anyone interested, I include two interesting resources for understanding all this. The first is Among the Carlists , which belongs later to the century than Dana’s adventures in Spain, but which might have been a source used by Lafferty. It is a first-hand depiction of 19th-century Carlism from the 1870s. In it, one meets an Irishman imprisoned in a castle. The other is Juan Donoso Cortés 's Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism . Cortés (1809–1853) was a Spanish diplomat and conservative political theorist. Early in his life, he had been a rampant champion of liberalism. His later critique of nineteenth-century liberalism held that only Catholic moral authority could avert social and political collapse. Known today for his influence on Carl Schmitt (Schmitt admired his thought), Cortés also shaped twentieth-century Carlism. Wihelmsen wrote about this several times. The Catholicism–Liberalism–Socialism continuum in Cortés articulates a political imaginary very close to that of  The Flame is Green , before the Green Revolution opens up possibilities for Dana. Because it is the quintessential form of Catholic reaction in the Catholic imagination of Lafferty’s time, and because Dana rejects it, this is another reason not to label Lafferty reactionary .

A Note on This Post I am leaving this post as it stands. When I saw the depth of Lafferty’s views on Jews, I began to see his work differently. The clearest sign is that he omitted the Holocaust from a book he called a complete history of the twentieth century. There are smaller indicators too: the rabbi blessing pork in "Bright Flightways," a story I otherwise admire, or the Zionist in "Forty-Seventh Island.” One could easily trace a trail of such clues. What surprised me most was how little any of it seems to matter to the Lafferty community. A Theory Cognitive dissonance. Many Lafferty admirers treat him as a tall-tale spinner, not as a moralist. They may not realize it, but they do. He was a moralist who used clowning as method, not a clown by nature. He passed judgment on everyone, including his readers, leaving no stone unthrown. Yet most fans prefer to think of Lafferty as a jokey sage, someone dispensing a whimsical humanist wisdom, even though he made it abundantly clear that he rejected humanism and that his wisdom was hostile to secular expansiveness. An Age Problem Not Lafferty’s; his readers’. Most are older now. They think they know him and resist a truer, more complex Lafferty. Many lean left and are too ready to excuse things like Holocaust denial because they like him and want to believe such views never touched his fiction. I like him too. But because I read him as a moralist, I cannot excuse him when he is morally wrong. To do so would make it impossible to enjoy his sharpness when he skewers the falsehoods around us. Community Silence It has been over two months since I raised the issue of Holocaust denial and antisemitism in Lafferty’s work. No one with a public platform in the Lafferty community has addressed it. On Facebook, most responses came from Jewish readers: Jakov Varganov, Alex Krislov, Nancy Lebovitz. Others dismissed it. One suggested Lafferty had read about Holocaust denial in a book and merely repeated it. The leading voices around East of Laughter —Kevin Cheek, Gregorio Montejo, and Daniel Otto Petersen—have remained silent. None has publicly acknowledged the post, or the fact that Lafferty, whose work is celebrated in five volumes of Feast of Laughter , denied the Holocaust. On Ferguson and Petersen Petersen has said he plans to address the issue, and I believe him. Ferguson has said nothing publicly, though he offered to make a statement for my blog. I declined. Once I knew he had long been aware of Lafferty’s Holocaust denial and chose silence, I could not trust him as a biographer to tell it straight. When Ferguson wrote about the antisemitism in Dotty , he minimized it. Anyone familiar with both Lafferty and Dotty knows how much of the author inhabits that novel. Having worked closely on Dotty , I found Ferguson’s post self-conscious. He wrote that “a character is not its author,” and asked readers like me to balance Dotty’s antisemitism against Lafferty’s other depictions of Jews while keeping in mind a “mental apology to all the good Jews.” I have done that . But if Ferguson knew of Lafferty’s Holocaust denial when he wrote that post, he stacked the deck. Holocaust denial is directly relevant to any discussion of antisemitism—unless one believes denial itself is not antisemitic, as some have argued. Why, then, did Ferguson not acknowledge that Lafferty denied the Holocaust? Ferguson’s own blog shows he was familiar with the archive, and Dotty was published by the same person to whom Lafferty wrote his denial letter. Could he really at the time have missed the IHR materials? I don’t know what he knew when. He never updated the post. I will continue to note that Lafferty openly denied the Holocaust after the late 1960s, drawing on The Myth of the Six Million , and that—despite this—he remains a writer of real significance. But Ferguson’s omission is a stain on Lafferty’s reception because he was the leader in a small field. It did nothing to help our understanding of how Lafferty lived with conspiracy, and it is critically relevant to his representation of Jews. Academic Silence Make no mistake: some trained academics who work on Lafferty have known about his antisemitism, if not his outright Holocaust denial. They chose not to address it because it was inconvenient, professionally risky, or simply unpleasant as Lafferty fans. I assume they understood its significance; I respect their intellects. Yet they avoided it even in contexts where it was clearly relevant, such as discussions of Lafferty’s other views. What makes this disappointing to me is that Lafferty was not a virulent antisemite. The issue could—and should—have been examined with the intellectual tools academics are well equipped to use. What happened instead was in my view reputation management disguised as nuanced appreciation, as if Holocaust denial could be treated as just another reactionary opinion or dismissed as a late-life failure rather than a sustained ideological position. And it worked. Had Lafferty’s Wikipedia entry acknowledged his denial, the Library of America Past Maste r edition would likely have been a more difficult. It is, to me, obvious what happened. Again, this is my opinion. If you read “Leptophlebo,” pay close attention to how Lafferty encodes his views on Jews. Once you see it, you will start noticing it elsewhere, too. --- Oh I knew a Doctor Gluck, And his nose it had a hook, And his attitudes were anything but Aryan; So I gave him all the pork That I had, upon a fork; Because I am myself a Vegetarian .— G. K. Chesterton "How can we tell you that? It's a secret. We know you are not so base a person as to want us to tell you the answer. You will have the pleasure of guessing it as the years go by, but we will not tell it to you. Ah, your gold is ready for you, Canute." “One does not only wish to be understood when one writes; one wishes just as surely not to be understood. It is by no means necessarily an objection to a book when anyone finds it incomprehensible.” — Friedrich Nietzsche It's hard to miss the big idea in “The Skinny People of Leptophlebo Street," where Lafferty aims at the extractive capitalism Pope Leo XIII condemned in De Rerum Novarum (1891). But it isn't an easy story. It's secretive. The bits amass into something strange, both bold and cautious. This is no accident but deliberate coding, and today I'd like to examine that, although it takes us into areas of Lafferty's work that no one discusses openly. In this story so much hinges on Hiram Poorlode's line, "Believe me, the hook isn't a logical one." Image by Joseph Jacobs (1854–1916) The story's setting is familiar. Lafferty once again gives the reader a form of microtopia that he particularly favors: the odd, half-magical street. We find this in novels like Serpent's Egg , with Structo Lane, as well as in short stories, such as "In Our Block." Canute Freeboard, the story's protagonist, wanders onto Leptophlebo Street wanting money for a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. We are never told what the opportunity is. This might be a connection to leptophlebia since mayflies live under extreme temporal pressure: they must seize the opportunity to mate and die. In any case, Canute discovers a peculiar community of extremely skinny residents on Leptophlebo, which includes clever monkeys, and learns that these, the people of Leptophlebo Street, make “profitable” use of nearly every scrap of material around them. One of them, Hiram Poorlode, is particularly important. He is a nut merchant, but, more importantly, he is a moneylender who has a near limitless amount of gold stored beneath the cobblestones of the street. Canute eventually secures the funding from Hiram that he needs for the opportunity (Hiram says that Canute's security is his face), but when Canute returns to the street, presumably successful in his speculative venture, he undergoes a series of “free” procedures that turn him into an emaciated, ghoul-like person. There are two versions of the story. In the original 1975 publication, the effects of the surgeries are only implied. As I interpret all this, the gold results from Leptophlebo’s usurious alchemical biocapitalism: the extracted flesh in the story somehow becomes the pounds of gold under the cobblestones. Exactly how that happens is undecidable, with this indeterminacy being built into the narrative. So, how can one get at the "oh, you have to guess where the gold comes from" coyness that Lafferty places at the dead center of "The Skinny People of Leptophlebo Street"?   One approach is to take a page from the literary critic Hugh Kenner, who had a critical principle for reading the great but antisemitic Ezra Pound. He advised treating the allusions and references in the Cantos  as tangents that pick out a curve. Building on this, we can think of textual clues as the derivative of a function, a collection of tangents that give readers the slope of a curve. If readers are given enough of these, they can integrate, performing the reverse of differentiation, to recover the original curve. One consequence is that you will not know the exact vertical position unless you have at least one point on the curve. Lafferty withholds that vertical coordinate. (“We know you are not such a fink-dink as would like to be told,” Effie said. “It took the last one about a thousand years to guess it, and you want to miss all that fun?”). And why he withheld it may be why he rewrote the ending of the story. Added on 8/8/25 With this in mind, here are some tangents on "The Skinny People of Leptopheblo Street":   Lafferty’s secret society Glomerule (best known from his brilliant “About a Secret Crocodile”) operates in the background. I take Glomerule to represent a lineage of anti-Catholic modernity, along with the Church’s own critique of that tradition, which reaches back to Pope Clement XII’s 1738 bull In eminenti apostolatus , which condemned Freemasonry. That history reached its peak in the farce of the Taxil hoax in the 1890s. Glomerule also links the story to King Solomon, who stands at the origin of Masonic mythology. The allusion to Solomon probably explains why the moneylender is named Hiram. There are two important Hirams in the story of the building of Solomon’s Temple. First is King Hiram of the Phoenicians, who supplied Solomon with gold and cedar, and then there is “Hiram Abiff,” the master mason sent by King Hiram. The Hiram Abiff legend plays a central role in Masonic ritual. Of the king, 1 Kings 9:11-14 says :“Hiram the king of Tyre furnishing Solomon with cedar trees and fir trees, and gold according to all he had need of… then Solomon gave Hiram twenty cities in the land of Galilee. And Hiram came out of Tyre to see the towns which Solomon had given him, and they pleased him not. And he said: Are these the cities which thou hast given me, brother? And he called them the land of Chabul, unto this day. And Hiram sent to king Solomon a hundred and twenty talents of gold.” That Hiram was haughty and insulted by Solomon’s gift and found the Galilean cities displeasing makes him, to my mind, a little sinister, though biblical scholars haven’t been able to agree on what this episode means or why Hiram rejected the cities. The connection between King Hiram and the gold beneath Leptophlebo Street seems like a solid one, and it probably also explains the monkeys, because . . . In addition to supplying Solomon with gold, King Hiram also gave him monkeys. [I know Lafferty noted the monkey connection in his private papers. ] As 1 Kings 10:22 puts it: “For the king had merchant ships at sea with the fleet of Hiram. Once every three years, the merchant ships came bringing gold, silver, ivory, apes, and monkeys.” This detail, of gold and monkeys arriving together, seems especially suggestive in the context of Leptophlebo Street, where both appear as part of its peculiar economy. Where did King Hiram get the gold? The details are mysterious, just as the origins of the gold hoarded by Hiram Poorlode on Leptophlebo Street are left unclear. Readers of Tarzan probably know the basics: “The fleet of Hiram that brought gold from Ophir . . .” Because Ophir plays such a major role in pulp adventure fiction, the connection intrigues me, though I’m not sure much can be done with it. Then there are the echoes of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice . Some are small. Others are central to Lafferty’s story, especially the line about a pound of flesh ("The third legend is that it is all pound-of-flesh gold."), which suggests that moneylending and flesh extraction are the reasons the people of Leptophlebo are so thin. But Merchant  might also be the source of the monkeys. In Act 3, Scene 1, Shylock says of his late wife’s ring, “I would not have given it for a wilderness of monkeys.” The monkey with bagpipes may also point in this direction, since bagpipes are mentioned by Shylock (“And others when the bagpipe sings i’th’ nose / Cannot contain their urine”), and the commodification of excreta is a key idea in the story. In any case, the Hiram, Solomon, and Shylock connections take the story into what will be uncomfortable territory for many. Psychoanalysis as a Jewish tradecraft might be behind the following joke: “Analyze your dreams, analyze your dreams!” a little boy of the street was making a pitch. “My father makes fine dream analyses free. Lie down on the cobbles.” “How can your father make a living by analyzing dreams free?” Canute asked. “Residuals,” the little boy said. “He gets rich on the residuals.” Here, the residuals are both showbiz payments. and what Sigmund Freud called Tagesreste —the day's residues that appear in the manifest content of the dreamwork. 6.  This aspect of the narrative becomes even thornier when one looks at the Jewish figure who accepts gold from Hiram Poorlode, Mr. Schlemel kurz Karof, also known as The Lean Eagle. Like the grackles caught by the quicklime on Effy Poorlode’s hat, he is ensnared. This might have some connection to Shakespeare’s inspiration for The Merchant of Venice , Il Pecorone  ( The Golden Eagle ). 7. Now, I will say something very speculative: the story has a strong dimension of monetary allegory. It runs from the mercantilist capitalism favored by Hiram Poorlode and the other people of Leptophlebo, with their bullionism, to the paper system used by the monkeys, monkeys who, we learn, may have become monkeys because of the gold. The monkeys are even called "people" at one point: “People of the monkey caste are not allowed to talk”). Specifically, given how seriously Lafferty took the ideas of Belloc and Chesterton and how he interpreted the 1930s, when he thought the old world had completely unravelled, the paper money seems to be a Bellocan critique of fiat currency and of the economic agents who are exploited by it. So Lafferty is probably grinding his gears about both usury and F.D.R. , a man he reviled, taking the U.S. off the l gold standard, and then about Nixon eliminating its last vestige in 1971 . Leptophlebo Street may stand in as a satire of the Federal Reserve. If all of this holds up, Lafferty has encoded a critique of how the dollar and the pound, once they became the world’s reserve currencies, replaced gold with increased monetary velocity and abstraction, thereby intensifying usury. “A man’s face is his security.” The story might imply that this opened the world to intensified superexploitation. Capital overspills its limits. It finds ever-new areas to commodify, making possible greater assaults on human dignity by potentially commodifying the flesh, down to night-soil and scum on the teeth, opening previously unimaginable markets. Hiram Poorlode's wife, Effie Poorlode, puts this clearly: "Ah, there is profit everywhere you look, in the stones, in the air, in the very rain." It is a short hop from this to seeing the Lean Eagle as the American eagle, with the escalating debt of the 1960s and early 1970s. As I mentioned, the story’s original version in Orbit 16 (1975) ends differently from the one printed in Lafferty in Orbit (1991). In the original, Canute reflects on the hook, saying, “I have swallowed the hook without noticing it,” and then adds, “I wonder what distinguishing mark has been placed upon me?" Not specifying that the mark strikes me as being significant. It leaves open other possibilities, and I think of Lafferty's novel Archipelago (1979), where the Jewish "Stein was interested in noses.   I don’t have a synthesis; I do believe “The Skinny People of Leptophlebo Street” is continuous with the post- Rerum Novarum  Distributist critique of capitalism advanced by Belloc and Chesterton. If anyone manages to integrate the tangents coherently (“the pleasure of guessing it as the years go by”), I suspect the result will be controversial for the same reason Belloc and Chesterton remain so. The emphasis on the hook, the moneylending, exploitation, the money hunger, the stinginess ("We have but one pair of shoes here, and whateverperson goes to make a prestigious visit will wear the shoes"), and the concealed wealth, as well as details such as the Yiddish name Schlemel kurz Karof , the rip-off of the monkeys, the psychoanalysis joke, and the insular ghetto of Leptophlebo Street that outsiders must visit for a loan all point in that direction. But I may be wrong. ADDENDUM This post was originally written in May 2025. After being redirected here on 08/08/2025 from the original post where I revealed Lafferty's history of Holocaust denial, Gregory Feeley made a valuable bibliographic comment: You seem to believe that the 1991 version is more recent than the 1975 one. (You refer to the latter as “the original.”) But Bryan Cholfin assembled the contents of  Lafferty in Orbit from Lafferty’s manuscripts, not from the tearsheets of the published versions. (You can tell because his text contains Lafferty’s sometimes-eccentric punctuation, which the Putnam’s and Harper & Row copy editors would have regularized.) So it is very possible that Damon Knight edited out (presumably with Lafferty’s acquiescence) what he regarded as a too-fulsome detail. This was an important detail I hadn’t known when I first wrote about the themes in this story, and it was kind of him to take the time to point it out. Since visiting the University of Tulsa, photographing "The Skinny People" manuscripts, and reviewing the correspondence between Virginia Kidd and Damon Knight, I have a better sense of the story’s compositional history. It t urns out there are two long endings for the story, as well as one short ending. It was more complicated than either Feeley or I suspected. First Phase Lafferty writes "The Skinny People" manuscript with his original ending. This version later appears in Lafferty in Orbit  (1991). Second Phase At Knight’s request, Lafferty writes a new ending. This version adds the "distinguishing mark" and hook swallowing, and it includes a narrative ending marked "Afterword." Third Phase Knight reacts negatively. In his May 5, 1974 letter to Virginia Kidd, he calls the new ending “bloody awful” and decides to cut the "Afterward" but keeps the newly added distinguishing mark and hook swallowing material. This was how Lafferty built up to the stronger ending Knight wanted. Kidd’s confirmation In her note to Lafferty, Kidd explains Knight’s edits, saying they “have pretty much brought the story back to your original conception.” Final published version (1975) The rewritten but slashed text as it appeared in print, incorporating Lafferty’s additions such as the “disgushing mark” and “swallowing the hook,” but not the narrative Afterward. 1991 version The Lafferty in Orbit  text, based on Lafferty’s original manuscript. On April 15, 1974, Virginia Kidd acknowledged the tendency of Lafferty’s stories to end without dramatic resolution. She wrote to Knight, Sometimes, with Lafferty stories, I am unable to make a precis; and quite often, I'm not 100% sure just what levels he wants to be understood at. But my best reading of THE SKINNY PEOPLE leads me to believe that is talking about people who have nothing left but their bones. I think they are maybe the dead . . . . On May 5, 1974, Knight wrote back to Kidd: Dear Virginia, I send you herewith contracts for THE SKINNY PEOPLE , which I am happy to get. The new ending is bloody awful (Raphael Aloysius thinks I want an explicit answer to the puzzle, although I would have to be daft to want that; but it is well known that all editors are sometimes daft), but it cuts like cheese, & what I propose to do is to cut, from p. 14, pp. 3–6, and also from “should be so trim?” to the bottom of the page; and then, from p. 15, to cut everything but the second sentence, from which I remove the quote marks. Ça va ? I like the changes R.A. made earlier in the story, & think it is a jolly piece of work now. And I would like to quote from his wonderful letter in Arcs & Secants , & will keep it with your permission until I have a chance to copy. Love, Damon The "Skinny People" material at Tulsa runs about forty pages, not including the correspondence, and there may be additional material at the Virginia Kidd Literary Agency. Since Andrew Ferguson has worked in the Kidd Agency archives, he is likely the person who knows the most about what’s there. The Afterword variant has never been printed, but it gives a direct, though weak, resolution to the story's central puzzle. Canute Freeboard stays on Leptophlebo Street and successfully figures out the secret of their wealth in under twenty years. Having solved the main mystery, he is shown to be assimilated into the street's life, now amusing himself by working on a new, simpler riddle given to him by one of the monkeys. It ends with the lines, "Effie and Hiram are offering cash prizes for the best time in guessing their secret. And they sure do have a lot of gold to offer prizes out of." Where does this leave us? If the distinguishing mark is meant to suggest a Jewish nose, and the swallowing of the hook is part of a coded hooked-nose joke, then Lafferty doubled down on the antisemitic coding as he continued to develop the story. I had initially thought he was dialing it back. Even if no nose joke was intended, the story is plainly about usury. It contains hidden or hoarded wealth; portrayals of stinginess (“one pair of shoes”); exploitation of others for profit; a ghetto-like, insular community outsiders must visit for loans; a moneylender named “Hiram” linked to gold and mercantilism; a psychoanalysis joke tied to Freud as Jewish tradecraft; allusions to The Merchant of Venice  (“pound of flesh,” monkeys, Shylock quotations); and a Jewish-coded figure with a Yiddish name (“Schlemel kurz Karof”) associated with greed, each an antisemitic motif. My primary interest in "The Skinny People of Leptophlebo Street" is not bibliographical criticism. Instead, this was a post about whether Lafferty's fiction sometimes contains coded antisemitism, how such elements relate to his intellectual development, how they fit into his Roman Catholicism, and why neither Lafferty academics nor his broader readership have addressed this issue. When I first read "Skinny People" last May, it made me uncomfortable enough to write about it. Gregory Feeley had nothing to say about the thematic elements in this story. In my experience, this is typical of Lafferty fans, who would not hesitate to point out the problem in other writers. * Is this a bird joke? Lafferty’s fluency in German means he would have known that “fink” probably comes from the word finch , which fits perfectly with the story’s bird-ensnarement theme: "I will wait," Effie said. "The pot wants a bird, but the pot must wait also. These grackle birds attract one another for a while. This is not one of our own grackles that I know; it's one of the newly arrived grackles from the countryside. They will not be wary of one bird stuck there, nor of two birds stuck. They will not be wary of less than three stuck birds. I will be patient and I will have three grackles for food and for byproducts. Will you not stay with us this evening and have a look at our night life on Leptophlebo Street?" Compare "fink-dink" to the chirruping wordplay of "cheap-creep": "We know you are not such a cheap-creep as would listen even if someone whispered the answer to you."

A short note today. This is a fun purchase: an edition of the Grolier books that Hugh Lafferty bought for his son. It had a profound influence on RAL’s imagination—he said he remembered almost every word of it—and it’s still a delight to flip through. If you’re interested, you can look it up online here . Fascinating for those interested in ethno-essentiaism as Lafferty learned it. It is a window onto the world that ended.

Over the Christmas break, I have been considering teaching Past Master  next summer and posting the lecture recordings. I would probably begin with Heideggerian categories and work backward, letting the novel’s Thomistic and other Christian elements come into clearer focus by contrast. I would also likely assign Paul Kingsnorth’s recent Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity  as a supplementary text, given how directly it speaks to the questions Past Master  raises for a contemporary audience. This approach makes sense because Past Master  takes up questions that closely parallel those of Heidegger’s late philosophy, especially the questions of Being and Gestell . Gestell —usually translated as “enframing”—names the essence of modern technology: a mode of revealing in which beings appear primarily as standing-reserve ( Bestand ), ordered and made available for calculation and use. In Heidegger’s later work, this becomes significant because Gestell  describes a historically dominant way in which Being discloses itself today, one that conceals other possibilities of revealing and therefore marks a crucial site at which the question of Being must be reopened. At minimum, Heidegger’s vocabulary would be a shared set of terms for class discussion, allowing the novel’s problems to be examined without asking students to begin from the theological commitments within which Lafferty himself is thinking. The Nine are creatures of Gestell , and Astrobe’s cities are sites where enframing holds sway, so that human beings themselves are disclosed primarily as standing-reserve. For Heidegger, this is the danger internal to modern subjectivity from Descartes through Kant: what begins as the subject’s representational mastery of beings consummates itself in a technological revealing that sets upon everything, including the human, and recruits the subject as a functionary of ordering. In his 1930s lectures Heidegger thought that Nietzsche, as the thinker who most decisively works through this late turn in modern metaphysics, shows the subject reinterpreted as will to power and bound to eternal recurrence, no longer standing over beings, but caught within the same circuitry of ordering, so that the subject itself becomes something deployable and calculable, disclosed as standing-reserve. The end of Past Master  leaves open the possibility of another way of revealing and presencing ( Anwesen ) beyond Gestell , beyond late-modernity, which in Lafferty takes the form of Christian eschatological hope: The spirit came down once on water and clay. Could it not come down on gell-cells and flux-fix? The sterile wood, whether of human or programmed tree, shall it fruit after all? The Avid Nothingness, the diabolically empty Point-Big-0, is it cast away again? Is there then room for life? Shall there be return to real life? In "The Question Concerning Technology" (1954), Heidegger writes about this problem outside eschatology but with hope: But where danger is, / grows the saving power also. Let us think carefully about these words of Hölderlin. What does it mean ‘to save’? . . . ‘To save’ is to fetch something home into its essence, in order to bring the essence for the first time into its genuine appearing It also makes sense to read the two men together because, for all their insight, both must be understood within the horizon of Gestell  that the Second World War brought into brutal clarity. National Socialism intensified Gestell in its project of total ordering and mobilization. I have addressed this elsewhere in discussing both “Groaning Hinges of the World” and disguised totalitarianism on Astrobe. In short, Heidegger’s late thinking on Gestell  is inseparable from his disastrous attempt to think from within the prewar moment; Lafferty’s reflections on the work camps belong to the postwar horizon, the war camp itself standing as the twentieth century’s concrete image of human beings disclosed and administered as standing-reserve. What follows is a resource for tackling Past Master and Heideggerian questions of disclosure, ordering, and concealment, as well as the relation between technology and nature , largely decoupled from the Thomistic tradition in which I prefer to both.

“No one has ever really slaked his thirst in the bogus waters of reality. But almost everyone has imagined that he has. And the imagining is just as good. It was once said that subjectivity and objectivity were opposite sides of the same coin. Now we know that they are the same reverse side of the same coin, and the face of the coin is blank.” The Unique Media Imagination of Lafferty It would be a fun project to curate a chrestomathy of R. A. Lafferty’s thoughts on media, drawing intelligent connections to media studies. Why? Well, for two compelling reasons: Lafferty poured an immense amount of intellectual energy into crafting a new media imaginary, and let’s face it, there’s truly nothing like him. What he created has, so far, been a dead end, but it’s a fascinating one. Some stories practically select themselves for inclusion. “The Hand With One-Hundred Fingers” is a must, alongside pieces like “ Splinters ,” “ Thou Whited Wall ,” and “ Calamities of the Last Pauper .” Once you capture that category—the Lafferty media-broadcast story—along with relevant passages from his novels, especially Not to Mention Camels (1976) and The Elliptical Grave (1989), the scope of exploration expands dramatically. I’d certainly want to include the extraordinary sections on the Age of Silent Radio from The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny (1977) and the early media-related insights from Serpent's Egg (1987). Soon, the choices become challenging because Lafferty’s media ideas are deeply intertwined with his thoughts on consensus and conspiracy. Once you include that, you’re looking at a significant slice of his work. The Relevance of "The Hand With One-Hundred Fingers" I suspect “The Hand With One-Hundred Fingers” resonates even more now than when it first appeared. We are all veterans of the new digital culture, navigating social media, algorithmic feeds, bots, influencer economies, cancel culture, and networked propaganda. These are all media products, sold by tracking companies behind our backs. If Lafferty goes astray in the story, it might be on the question of centralization. His story-world presents a single, unified global news network, a tightly integrated media apparatus speaking with one voice. Yet, as we know, the 21st century is characterized by media fragmentation. No single platform or institution can dominate the flow of information anymore. However, I believe he is more right than wrong here. Today’s media may have a hundred “fingers”—platforms, influencers, micro-communities, and automated systems—but the owners of media can still coordinate when it truly matters. The illusion of decentralization masks economic coordination: the way oligarchs align with or intimidate state power, or how frontier AI firms present a united front against any legislation that might impose oversight or enforce safety constraints. The question of centralized media ownership versus decentralizing media channels is, of course, incredibly complex when it comes to signal control. That said, the stakes are uncomfortably close to where we find ourselves now. Lafferty's Media Thinking and Its Influences In most of Lafferty’s media thinking, there is significant overlap with the ideas of Harold Lasswell (1902-1978) and Edward Bernays (1891-1995), two of the earliest and most influential thinkers who framed mass communication as a tool of social control. Lafferty must have been aware of their work. Lasswell was a political scientist who studied World War I propaganda and concluded that modern societies required systematic management of opinion. This led to his famous media formula: who says what to whom through what channel with what effect. He believed mass media was essential for guiding public behavior. One must maintain a chokehold on social order. Bernays, often dubbed the father of public relations, took a more strategic and cynical approach that makes him resemble a patron saint of Lafferty’s media lords. In Propaganda (1928), he argued that democratic societies require the deliberate “engineering of consent,” using media to shape desires, beliefs, and habits. Nowadays, he’s probably best known due to Noam Chomsky. “The Hand With One Hundred Fingers” is a narrative where figures like Lasswell and Bernays have triumphed. Lafferty writes that a "century-long battle over the nature of reality" has been lost. In the world of the story, there exists a powerful union of Person-Projector firms known as The Hand With One-Hundred Fingers. This Hand dictates truth, manipulating the global electronic personality and rendering reality a mirage. Because reality has become this mirage, The Hand can instantly enhance or degrade citizens. All they need to do is project a consensus onto world television and onto individuals. This ensures there is no distinction between "seeming to have special attributes and actually possessing them." One area where Lafferty hits the nail on the head is that this all boils down to subscription services. Those who pay the fees to The Hand please the media lords; they gain access to success. Dissenters are biologically and socially rewritten into bestial beings whose presence becomes offensive to the senses. The Creation of an Untouchable Class This leads to the emergence of an untouchable class of individuals—people who, through acts of nonconformity or sheer bad luck, become scapegoated. Lafferty focuses on a handful of victims, including a married couple, Crispin and Sharon Babcock. They are targeted for refusing personality correction, and The Hand crushes them. They transition from being a loving couple to individuals who find each other physically repulsive. Then there’s Judge Roger Baluster, who refuses to pay maintenance fees on principle. The Hand projects the look of a buzzard over his once-eagle visage. Others, like Sylvester Sureman, are ruined by clerical errors, becoming Mr. Quagmire. The once-beautiful Conchita Montez is rendered disgusting. The outcasts created by The Hand retreat to what Lafferty calls sly halls. These sanctuaries offer the excluded a modicum of culture and self-respect. But then, The Hand makes a breakthrough, breaching the sanctuary of the sly halls. The new tool of the Projection Lords? Smell. A killing stench is projected into the minds of the outcasts. The sly halls now appear to be places of stink-weed, slashing rats, and methane-rot. The outcasts flee from the hall. The ultimate “scapes” end up being Crispin and Sharon, whom the crowd abandons in sniggering horror. Despite the overwhelming urge to recoil from one another's foulness, the couple attempts a final, valiant defiance. They use a 3.05-meter pole to maintain physical distance and a tin-can telephone to communicate. This last-chance technology filters the sound-clashing horror from their voices. But it fails. A fourth assault from the Dynasty of Hatred overwhelms them, and they collapse. Lafferty writes that they are killed by mortal hatred for one another. It proves that The Hand "will not be cheated by any last-minute tricks." Media and Action at a Distance I mentioned some paleo-media theory, but a more recent work that this story brings to mind is Action at a Distance: How Are Human Actions Shaped by the Materiality of Media? (2020). This collection includes essays by John Durham Peters (always worth reading), Florian Sprenger, and Christina Vagt. It examines how objects or people can be acted upon without physical contact, ranging from Newtonian physics and Stephen Gray’s electrical experiments to contemporary computer simulations. The projectors in Lafferty's story are peculiar instruments of action at a distance—what the book describes as the transmission of force or information across a void. The story literalizes this phenomenon as a mechanism of social control. As science fiction, this may not be especially compelling, but as Lafferty’s exploration of media acting at a distance and seemingly more ontologically “real” (the stench), especially in relation to the experience of time and presence, it is. We see this at the end of the story, when Crispin and Sharon use tin cans to talk to each other while pressing against one another with poles in the same space, using the mediation of clothing, poles, and cans to try to save their marriage against the counter-mediations being projected onto their persons: The two Babcocks headed into a stiff wind that blew the smell off them pretty well. Why, this would be almost bearable, this life together-apart! Only ten feet apart, and they could breathe. They were hooded and shrouded, of course, and could never actually see each other again, but remembered appearances came to them that were a little less horrible than they had been used to in more recent times. Each pressed his end of the pole with mittened hand, and it was almost like holding hands again. They even became a little bit jocular in their rusty-voiced banter back and forth. “Ship to shore, ship to shore!” “My wife is a rot-headed, smelly bore,” Crispin bawled into his tin can, and they both laughed. “Ship to shore” and “shore to ship” had been their tin-can telephone code when they were children. Projection in Lafferty's Work One of the more intriguing examples of this in Lafferty is Doctor Fritz Otto in The Elliptical Grave . Projection is one of its main themes, with the expedition project getting ensnared in its projection ecology. Dr. Fritz is a movie mogul, a biological person and cinematic machine. He possesses the mutational ability to become a living projector. When he does, he can manifest sensory experiences like the physical reality of being buried alive. He can even project a composite world indistinguishable from the actual environment. His bodily presence is action at a distance while in the proximate presence of the projector, himself: Doctor Fritz sat easy and smiling. He was a man who could project with great power but without strain. It was a comfortable intensity that he had. Doctor Fritz was a dynamo, apparently at rest, his high-speed rotation indicated only by the low humming that came from him (the tune that he hummed unconsciously may have been the old soldiers’ song Wir Lieben die Stürme ). And his quiet dynamic activity was also indicated by two green pilot lights (his two green eyes) that indicated that the projection was “all go.” Lafferty's media-focused stories continually return to this problem. In Action at a Distance , Vagt refers to it as “the phantasm of immediacy.” In story after story, Lafferty attempts to jolt readers out of their accustomed acceptance of the universalizing unreality of modern media by confronting them with the immediacy of his own uncanny media phantasms. Conclusion: The Nihilistic Argument of Media Saturation I’ll close with a note on the passage quoted from the story that opens this post—one of my favorite lines in Lafferty on the effects of media saturation. It appears in a Lafferty paratext inside “The Hand With One Hundred Fingers,” credited to Johnathan Fomry Bierce, whose middle name is an Irish term for phantom and whose forename and surname come from two bitterly caustic satirists. This line crystallizes the central nihilistic argument: that objective truth is an empty fiction (“bogus waters”), and humanity’s preference for comforting simulations has rendered actual reality irrelevant. If subjectivity and objectivity are the same side of a single coin, the obverse a “blank face,” then reality has no intrinsic meaning, no fixed standard. There is no revelation by which truth can be measured, no canon line. That blank face of the coin is bound to media’s annihilation or manipulation of the imago Dei . The Hand’s targeting of a sacramental marriage and the destruction of its children is religiously significant. But I’ll set aside the religious aspects this time. As I’ve mentioned before, I read Lafferty as a paranoid philosophical Catholic realist, not as anything close to a paranoid postmodern Catholic. The coin passage is one of his most brilliant expressions of the media effects he argues with throughout his media stories.

“I'm going to invent a cogitational meter later today,”  Mary Mystic said, “to demonstrate that people are thinking more and deeper and straighter and with more invention, now that the several  ‘Flatland Decades’ are over with and the mountains are generating again.” — In a Green Tree, Part 5 God promised neither the Golden Apes nor the Whales to be successors to Man, nor did He promise Man that he would have no successor. Inneall’s Ocean is only about ten thousand square miles in Eastern Oklahoma, and it was being planned for at least thirty years before Inneall was manufactured. What’s in the Big Egg is still secret, but Dubu guessed it and you may be able to do so also. — "Epilog By A Sea Louse,"  Serpent's Egg A previous post sketched how I think the Lafferty canon fits together. This one traces a complication, turning to the unfinished Part 5 of In a Green Tree . The Green Tree  manuscripts exist in several forms. One is a finished, paginated version made up of four parts that span the years 1920 to 1978. In addition to this complete sequence, there is another section in the Tulsa archive labelled Part 5: In the Akrokeraunian Mountains. 1978–1990 . The manuscript pages themselves have the title “In the Thunderbolt Mountains,” which is an English translation of the Greek name for the range. This English title brings in Lafferty’s use of mountain and lightning imagery. Think of the ending of Past Master . When read as part of the larger Green Tree  project, Part 5 promises a lot. If completed, it would have answered his “The Day After the World Ended.” It would have been a way out of the Flatland announced in Part Four of Green Tree . Part 5 was meant to be an escape. With this in mind , In a Green Tree  becomes a very different book when the unfinished Part 5 is read as part of its whole. In it, Lafferty shifts from what I have called his low-mimetic mode (where characters are on the same level of power and status as ordinary people, realistic, human, etc.) into the Oceanic mode, the generically unstable territory of his Oceanic Novels. As you might expect, the mountains in the Part 5 matter deeply. They are physical formations and master symbols, undergoing constant transformation. They rise; they sink. Historical records describe land lifting by five hundred feet in five months, while parts of Oklahoma have sunk between four and twelve feet, a transformation as radical as Inneall’s ocean. This is "The Return of the Mountains," marking the close of a "Flatland World" and the rise of "mountainous thoughts and urges." So Part 5 differs from what comes before it. By recalling the school scene that begins “My Heart Leaps Up,” you can imagine how very different. Here is one example. The character Mary Mystic O’Trassy believes the Mountains are about to return. There are illusions, telepathy, chromosomal manipulation, and theories about the universe being swallowed. And the mountains do return. Flatland ends. Everybody was already out there. You wouldn't catch any of the folks around there waiting for the break of dawn for something like that. And it was a beautiful mountain in the pre-dawn rose light. "It's huge!" Mary Mystic cried. "It must be fifty feet high." "Twenty-two feet eight inches," her father said. "Its slowed down a bit now, after its break-through, but it's still risen more than a foot in the last fifteen minutes." But it hadn’t, of course, for the author. This is the puzzle, the problem Lafferty as a writer could not solve. If he had, he would not have been Lafferty. He would not be the writer who brings us closer to the edge of transformation than anyone I can think of, but who does not move us past the leap. His inability to solve it makes it all the more generative. Which brings me to Serpent’s Egg , because Green Tree  tries to solve what I’ll call the Big Egg Problem in Lafferty—something the Coscuin Chronicles  and Argo  Legend also attempt in their own ways. The problem is this: how can the low mimetic transcend its own horizon? What is the Big Egg? Well, it’s in almost every Lafferty novel in some form. When people talk about Serpent’s Egg , they often point out that it ends with a Sea Louse writing. That’s true. It’s certainly memorable. But what I think they should notice—and talk about—is the Big Egg. It casts its shadow over the novel’s mega-persons. It’s there in the title. The novel never says what’s inside the Big Egg. That part is left for you to figure out. As odd as Serpent’s Egg  is, it is itself a Flatland. One sees this in the depiction of media, with some of its more difficult passages ("The voices usually had the 'all-people throatiness' that had become the consensus voice of the media, now that it had been admitted that everyone was an ethnic and that there were no regular people left.") I hear this in Inneall's "I am not conscious, I am not conscious." And it's clear in what Lafferty writes about a terminal version of the servile state , the novel’s floating world, the Kangaroo. Green Tree  is one of Lafferty’s most difficult masterpieces. But what Lafferty can do in an Oceanic Novel like Serpent’s Egg  is beyond the reach of his low-mimetic mode. The difference has to do with history. In the Oceanic Novels, Lafferty moves away from the low mimetic and also breaks with modern ideas of history to create large fantasies about Heilgeschichte . Green Tree  is a crowded but small Heilgeschichte in a very different way. The Oceanic Novels take flight—into what is true and false in ways that can’t be reduced to the priorities of historical modes of knowing. The eruption of the mountains in Part 5 of In a Green Tree  was an attempt to crack open the Big Egg in a world that will not permit it. That world lacks the deep anagogical intensity needed to contain it. Put plainly, the Second Coming of Christ would sit more naturally in In a Green Tree  than the extraordinary children who arrive in its abandoned culmination. So, again, what is the Big Egg in Serpent’s Egg , and why can’t In a Green Tree  contain it? To jump ahead, readers of Lewis or Tolkien will know why. Middle-earth cannot contain Aslan. Serpent’s Egg  gives us a story about young characters who are both full of promise and doomed. In the Lynn-Randal Experiment, three super-mega-persons are created: Lord Randal, a human boy; Axel, a golden ape; and Inneall, a girl-computer. These three later join nine other engineered children to form a Magic Dozen. Together, they begin to change the world. The novel toys with the idea that these children must be destroyed early for the world’s safety. But the reader suspects something else. At one point, an assassin calls the experiment children “damnable mixtures of the human and the animal and the machine,” with “roots in hell.” Collectively, they are a late portrait of the zoon anthropikon having passed through human technology, which is to say, a version of human history. Here, Lafferty’s Catholic themes are already visible. The children are a new kind of humanity—a Second Humanity; and the title Serpent’s Egg  cannot help but call to mind the Genesis serpent and original sin. Here we find Lafferty’s signature strategy of counterfiguration . At the novel’s climax, Lutin, a hybrid pythoness, suddenly lays an enormous glowing egg. Inneall is stunned: “That egg is three meters long and two meters thick!” Lutin explains that the egg is “exactly like me, in every way,” and calls it a “wonderful, blessed, hope-of-the-world thing.” You don’t need to be Thomas Aquinas to recognize the Marian tropes at play. Inneall examines the egg and reports, “It is artificial… There’s electronic gear inside the shell, and a mechanical pump is pumping in there. But there’s something alive inside this big egg too.” As with the ark in The Elliptical Grave , this is a techno-biological womb. A nurse-whale, Miol-Mor, is assigned to care for the egg and communicates in the click-whistle of the whale language. Here we find a variation on the spirit descending on gel cells, as described at the end of Past Master . But we have moved beyond hope. We are now given a literal organism, an embryo, encased in a fusion of machinery and mystery. Dubu, the bear, calls it the “Ultimate Egg” and hints that hidden agents created it as part of a cosmic joke. This ties the novel’s plot to the humor and chaos of Lafferty’s other eschatological comedies. In fact, the novel overflows with biblical prophecy, hermeticism, and eschatology. A faux Book of Jasher is quoted, mocking the humility of Christ’s birth and imagining an absurd version of a “Second Coming.” Lafferty suggests that salvation often arrives in strange forms. Dubu recalls being told by invisible “odd fellows”—likely angels—that the egg is “the joke by which the World will be saved and transformed.” The serpent, Lutin, becomes the unlikely bearer of redemption. The novel is threaded with verses like “Fear not, little flock…” that distinguish its world as one of divine providence. The whales, who serve as truthful record-keepers, declare that a “Second Humanity,” made from humans, machines, and uplifted animals, is now coming into being in God’s image. Lafferty gathers together Genesis with its serpent, the Gospels with the birth of Christ, and Revelation with its vision of new creation, and wraps them all inside the image of the Big Egg. The novel never directly tells us what is inside the Big Egg. Readers must piece it together from hints in the dialogue and symbols. Is it a Divine Child? Is it the Universe or a World-Soul? Dubu says, “A universe is always egg-shaped,” and she believes this Serpent’s Egg “is a universe.” Could it be the New Humanity itself? I think this is the kind of break from Flatland that Lafferty wanted. It would dissolve the historical into the metaphysical. History is a kind of eggshell for Lafferty, which is why it is a grail quest. Lafferty knew this. "The grail-myths," he wrote to Sheryl Smith, "are part of the general quest myths, but grail-myths have built-in failure for the reason of fetishism. The grail quest is always pursuing the box or cup that the thing came in, rather than the thing itself." In the Argo legend, Lafferty takes his readers as far as he can into eternity. The mountain slopes in Green Tree , though grand, are surfaces. They are sublime exteriors but substitutes for the thing itself, his religious faith. He could not get there through Green Tree ’s low-mimetic inertia. Its incompletion dramatizes its central theme. This is a roundabout way of saying that in the Ghost Story, Lafferty created an imaginative universe that contains Green Tree,  but did not create a  Green Tree  that could contain it. How could he?

I keep playing around with the idea that Harry Stephen Keeler’s webwork might help understand what Lafferty was trying to do with post-fictional consciousness. What I have done is use ideas about Lafferty and world-creation to build a model that tracks causality through those principles. I thought I would share the EOL work for anyone interested in that immensely complicated novel, the one where he really separates the sheep from the goats. I have also added an ecological database to the blog. You can find it on the bar, along with the new Lafferties section, which includes a trivia game.