“Then Paul went back to the town, climbed up the idol at midnight (it was five hundred feet high and sheer and slick as ice); he pried out the emerald eye and substituted the green kidney. It fit perfectly. ‘I knew it would,’ said Paul.” On the East of Laughter Facebook group, Brad Frank, a long-one Lafferty reader who knew the man, recently posted about finding a copy of Past Master at the Tulsa flea market: Frank's lucky find got me thinking about the original Past Master cover again. It was done by the Dillons (more about them soon) who also did the cover for Lafferty’s short story collection Iron Tears  (1992). Lafferty sometimes spoke about the covers, ones he liked and those he disliked. For example, Lafferty liked Robert LoGrippo 's surreal cover art for  The Devil Is Dead (1971), but he told a correspondent he did not know who painted it. At the other end of the spectrum, Lafferty is on record as really hating the cover art for East of Laughter  (1988). Who could blame him? In 1991, when the University of Oklahoma Press edition of  Okla Hannali  neared publication, a bad cover was as much a fact of Lafferty publishing as broken noses are a fact of boxing. Consider what happened when Lafferty first saw the cover art for the reprint of Okla Hannali . He must have been expectant. For the first time, Lafferty would appear in long form under the imprint of a university press, and Okla Hannali is a very great book. After seeing the cover art, Lafferty was amused. He wrote: Thank you for the sample of the cover jacket of my book OKLA HANNALI. Why no, I don't agree that the result is quite unsatisfactory. Nothing ever is. I am not a ‘retired newspaperman.’ But the picture on the cover is another matter. When somebody showed the picture to Hannali where he was pitching horseshoes with some friends in that green meadow just inside the Pearly Gates, he burst out with the loudest laughter I ever since . . . ‘That shriveled-up Cherokee with nothing to be mad about, is the funniest thing I have ever seen.’ I am a Choctaw man as wide as I am high, I live happy, and I died happy, and I am happy in this fun place . . . . Then he laughed so loud that God himself had to intervene with a ‘Cool it, Hamali, you're making so much noise.’ Yes, it is a funny thing. But it's a good laugh that bursts above the stars and I tell you confidentially that something even funnier will happen here tomorrow . . . And no, I will not let the picture be changed. That would spoil the joke. Not the Chocktaw chuckler: the shriveled up Cherokee from the cover of the University of Oklahoma edition of Oklahoma Hannali , To this day, the book gets it wrong. Looking at my copy, it calls Lafferty a newspaperman. The Dillons’ Past Master  cover appears not to have been among Lafferty’s favorite covers or illustrations of his work. It is my favorite. It was done by the extraordinary Leo and Diane Dillon, two artists now well known to science-fiction and fantasy readers. Harlan Ellison dedicated Dangerous Visions  (1967) to them; and they illustrated Lafferty’s terrific “Land of the Great Horses,” which appeared in that volume. In the DV dedication, Ellison was Ellison. He commented on the black-and-white art the couple had produced and, at the same time, made a sixties political statement about their interracial marriage. They had taught him something about race and art. I want to be careful here because for as good as Ellison often is, he is very silly and very theatrical, and because Lafferty’s views on race are complicated. Suffice it to say I do not think the dedication would have impressedor moved Lafferty. His reservation would have had far less to do with race than with the role race ideology played in the new left’s discourse of the 1960s. He would likely have disliked the utopian smell of Ellison’s rhetoric, for at the time Lafferty was thinking through his rejection of revolution. Marx famously said that he was not a uptipian. Lafferty would not have believed that. Past Master  is an ensemble of intermixed character types. Father Oddopter is a black man; there are many forms of hybridity present; but race and hybridity cohere inside an pugnaciousl anti-utopian vision. Here is what Ellision wrote in his dedication: Leo and Dianne Dillon's illustration for Lafferty's "Land of the Great Horses" Lafferty was often mordant about this flavor of grandiloquence. Of Ellison, he remarked that whatever Ellison said needed to be read in light of whom Ellison was trying to impress. Here, it was the readers of the new speculative fiction with its enlightened values, sociological commitments, and transgressive seasonings. The second time the Dillons illustrated Lafferty is the Past Master  cover, a year after Dangerous Visions . In looking at it, would Lafferty have though back to Harlan’s utopian rhetoric and the Dillon illustratiobs of stories he did not like? As far as I know, Lafferty never mentioned the Dillon art when asked about covers he liked. In my view, their work is by far the most artistically accomplished cover ever to appear on Lafferty books. Both Lafferty and the Dillons would later receive the World Fantasy Life Achievement Award—Lafferty in 1990, and the Dillons in 2008. Artwise, this is strength meeting strength, masters together. Nonetheless, we are looking at opposing ends of the American conversation. Ellison brought together Lafferty and the Dillons, and Ellison thought the old world was to be leveled for a brighter future. Children such as the Dillons’ son deserved as much. But it is fair to say that Lafferty thought like Harlan Ellison (Lafferty. Allen them the science fiction people) unintentionally paved Flatland with good intentions. Why? Because race and utopia are distinct issues in Lafferty’s mind. Making Father Oddopter black is a sincere symbolic move on his part, a didactic statement about universal Christian dignity at a moment of political crisis. An ex gf of mine who is black used to say we were not a mixed couple: we were both Catholic. It's an ol d line. At bo ttom, it is the view that utopia is political in a way that race is not. For men like Ellison, that distinction is nonsense. Race and utopia are both political projects. Ellison’s treatment of race is off-putting to me because of how political it tends to be: Harlan dropping into his slang mode, motormouthing jive , baby , jack ; Ellison with his sexy black and asian girls; Harlan, paladin of the lost hour, who couldn't help but get himself into trouble from time to time. In the draft for Past Master , we find the following excised passage: “So, the pack of you were modeled on the libs,” Major said. “And they were Programmed Persons from the beginning. It is most odd that they should come to the fore beyond honest men, but false coin always drives out good. It’s true that they were always machine-things in their minds, and now they are the majority. Concatenated chowder-heads they are! They walk in lock-step and they bleat in unison! The sick twang of their falsetto chorus curdles the heavens. Fools’ fools they are.” “Watch your talk,” said Holygee, “or I shall torture you in your brain with my extension. They are our fathers. They are our brothers, and we go into loving oblivion with them. And they are not all fools. Some of them have been very shrewd or they would not have come to the fore beyond divergent men. The bulk of folk, Major, has always been manipulated by a small number of astute men. And now the folk, in their terminal days, are manipulated by a small number of astute machines—ourselves and no more than a hundred others.” Setting all that aside, the quarrel with utopia is being played out in the materiality of  Past Master ’s physical cover, not just in its pages; the right-wing Lafferty and the left-wing Dillon brought together in 1968 to make this ephemeral object of the late 1960s, to make art. Returning to the Past Master cover, it really features two pieces of art by the Dillons. In 2012, the original lower image—the one of More, caught at the moment when he seems to realize what is happening with the banning of the beyond on Astrobe— was sold at Heritage Auctions . That sale gives us a chance to see the work in relatively high-quality resolution: Had I been a Lafferty reader at the time, I would have been seriously tempted to buy it. As far as I know, there is no high-resolution image of the upper, geometric piece. The Mondrian-like spiral at the top of the Ace cover is not merely decorative, in the way much science-fiction cover art is. It reads instead as an image of the book’s central enemy: the Nothing, Ouden. Several of the Ace Science-Fiction Special covers done by the Dillons used the two-part layout, with abstraction on top and representation at the bottom, but it is an especially effective choice for Past Master . Early in the novel, when More and Ouden meet, Ouden explains that his Nothingness is not a simple absence but a vortex. He boasts that he is, in fact, the shape of the universe. “Yes, I am that. But all who encounter me make the mistake of misunderstanding my nothingness. It is a vortex. There is no quiet or static aspect to it. Consider me topologically. Do I not envelop all the universes? Consider them as turned inside out. Now everything is on the inside of my nothingness. Many consider the Nothing a mere negative, and they consider it so to their death and obliteration.” And there, in the top geometrical image, we have the shape: a net, with its negative space, around the two planets. That Mondrian-like image at the top of the Ace Special captures it well. Past Master is deeply interested in shape. One thinks of the many things the novel says about shape: that shapes can be both objective and subjective at the same time; that thought has mysterious shape; that the future itself is a shape—the shape of things to come. The conceptual pun (being in a certain shape and being inside a certain shape) is already present in Past Master . In Arrive at Easterwine (1971), it is Valery Mok who sees Ouden: “It’s a cheese,” Valery offered hysterically, “rotted cheese and full of holes. A whole cosmos of maggotty cheese, turned green in its taint and rot. And the eggshells! What hatched out of them? I dreamed of them before I was born—pieces of broken eggshell millions of parsecs long.” In Past Master , it is eschatology; as the Past Master chapter title has it, “The Shape of Things to Come.” Past Master appeared in 1968, the same year Lafferty wrote the seed of Arrive at Easterwine in the unpublished short story “The Shape We’re In” (1968), so he seems to have had this entire cosmic shape-concept on his mind at roughly the same moment, and he was going at it in different ways. Ouden’s boast that he is the shape of the universe anticipates the imaginative climate of Arrive at Easterwine . The Dillons’ cover plays abstract shape against the human form, the Past Master movement from abstraction to humanity spatialized on the page, with its justly pained and paranoid Thomas More at the bottom. Is the blue circle Earth and the other Astrobe? Are we looking at Ouden as a vortex, a malignity that wraps reality and consumes, or are we looking at a visualization of what the book calls chornometanastasis? Or is it just an image of time going timey-whimey. Probably both, the Ouden-like vortex and the time tunnel. I will add that the shadowy hands are effective images of the book’s conspiratorial backdrop. If the three figures are Proctor, Foreman, and Kingmaker, perhaps refracted through Thomas More, then the entire cover reads as an illustration of the novel’s first two, or possibly three, chapters. One reason to suspect that what we see is drawn directly from those opening chapters, and that it therefore depicts the outermost layer of the conspiracy, is that the hands are so conspicuously human. There is another reason as well. I am not sure I want to call it an Easter egg, though it probably is one: a design element with a fascinating Paul–Sourwine/Ouden connection. Owing to the diet he had followed from his youth—alcohol, wormwood, green snails—one of Sour John’s kidneys had become vitrified, and in apeculiar manner. Not only had it turned into glass, but it had turned intoglass of a fine jewel-like green. This he had seen himself on the fluoroscope. No doubt some readers will think this a stretch, but how else is one to explain that green dot, so strange, so oddly out of place? Elsewhere, I have argued that the Sour John allegory matters because it provides one of two crucial allegorical clues to Ouden and idolatry. Yet the five critical allegories in Past Master  are routinely passed over, much as tens of thousands of eyes have glanced at that green dot without ever stopping to think about it. One last thing, and this is hopeful. If only the two planet-like shapes overlaying the eye of the androgynous figure were a nod to one of the most important and overlooked passages in the book: The two small stars that revolved around each other were joined together by a long steel chain. It was that which held them in their tight, rapid orbits; it was that which made them the governor of the universe. Paul quickly located the trouble. There was a small green creature, with the body of a monkey and the head of a gargoyle, cutting the chain with a hack-saw, and he had it near cut in two.“Pray that I be not too late!” If this is the right way to read the cover, then its imagery is visual alchemy applied to the novel’s first two or three chapters, elements that are not so much action-centered, but instead index its deeper secrets.

Bernard Baruch with JFK The Three Armageddons of Enniscorty Sweeny is so damned slippery. “It is slippery, General, slippery,” Austro said modestly. There will probably never be a consensus about it—how it works, what it does, what it says. The book overloads the mind. It arrests thought. It does so deliberately, aggressively. That is why serious Lafferty readers should think hard about it rather than settle for confusion as an endpoint. Aggressive Lafferty is interesting Lafferty. Most of Lafferty’s best contemporary readers recognize the novella’s strange power; no one has done much with it. Read a lot of Lafferty, and you know it is important. Moreover, what has been done has been wrong. Frequently, is a hard thing to know that an interpretation is wrong (that is, in error) rather than being unsound or in bad taste. Most interpretation doesn’t work on the right-wrong track. Most people who opine on books are poisoners, not throat cutters. But it can be wrong about 3A in the way Coleridge was wrong that Shakespeare never revised his plays; wrong in the way Tory critics were wrong who thought Keats just had bad grammar. Thinking 3A is politically innocent is wrong. A few people now seem to recognize this. Maybe only a little. There are progressive ideas in it about race. In that sense, Lafferty’s book about the dangers of consensus reality succeeded: there has been little consensus about 3A, and almost no one says anything insightful about it. So, where to start? Probably by spending some time with the book’s alternate-history timeline. I think we should consider the role Bernard Baruch plays in Lafferty’s alternative 20th-century. The timeline is a grad course on what Lafferty loves and hates, and I have been thinking about the timeline on and off for a few months. It brazenly omits the Jewish Holocaust and then does something odd: it patches over those Jewish Holocaust years with an image of Bernard Baruch. After mentioning Baruch briefly in an online comment this week, it seems worth laying out why Baruch matters. To see how 3A plays its cards like Bob Hamman, look at how Lafferty sets up the first black president, Harold Standpipe, early in the novella and then uses the goodwill earned to insulate what it does with Baruch. Several people have approved of Lafferty and Standpioe. No one has mentioned Baruch, probably because they have not noticed. That is what the old ladies at the bridge table call a good play. The last American president mentioned in the book is a native American. A minimal test for an adequate interpretation of 3A will be to explain why the American president during the Holocaust-that-never-happened affair was Jewish; more importantly, why he was one Jew in particular. It will then need to connect those facts to the reparations satire that becomes so important late in the novella. I believe that Lafferty is being exceptionally pissy here, implying that Baruch was a corrupting influence behind both the Democrats and the Republicans. Bernard Mannes Baruch (1870–1965) was an influential American financier and statesman who served for decades as an informal but powerful advisor to multiple U.S. presidents. He is exactly the kind of figure for whom the term éminence grise  exists. After making a killing on the New York Stock Exchange, he left Wall Street during World War I to help direct the nation’s economic mobilization as chairman of the War Industries Board. He later advised Franklin D. Roosevelt during World War II, contributing to the acceleration of war production and to policy formation both at home and abroad. After the war, Baruch remained at the center of geopolitics, representing the United States on the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission. The Cold War? Baruch coined the term in 1947. Baruch had a nickname: “the Park Bench Statesman.” He got it because he often conducted his consultations not in offices or formal meetings, but seated on a bench in Lafayette Park across from the White House. There he met informally with officials, politicians, and presidents, turning the park bench itself into a symbol of his role as a trusted elder counselor operating outside the machinery of formal power. More than one commemorative bench has been dedicated in his honor, and he is the Baruch in Baruch College.

He welcomed them as one of the rarest and heartiest foods ever. They entered into him. Ah, the salt and the sulphur of them would stand him well in his crux hour when it came. By eating its brains, he would always have a certain mastery over this enemy. Advanced Lafferty today. Reading The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Monsters  (2025) has me thinking again about Petersen’s idea of the ecomonstrous , which Petersen writes about in his dissertation. Lafferty fans who want to think with Lafferty should read it closely. Related to this, some time ago I wrote about the devil-hydra in Past Master . The diagram at the end of this post outlines how Petersen approaches the question of the monstrous. Where I disagree with him will probably be unsurprising: we ought to not abandon the tradition of monsters in the theological and Catholic folk imagination because Lafferty uses this as his seedbed. This comes out most clearly in the diagram in Section II (“Core Nature of the Monster”), especially in Petersen’s characterization of the ecomonstrous as “uncategorisable exorbitance” with no inherent moral valence. He proposes that readers might shift from “Monster = Evil” to “Monster = Too Much,” treating the monster as a neutral force of excess or glut. I agree that this kind of figure does appear in Lafferty. It is the sublimity of Leviathan in the Book of Job. What Peterson does well is identify a dialectical moment, but something essential is lost or becomes one-sided when the conceptual limit of the term is amoral weirdness. The ecomonstrous in Lafferty does not freeze itself as a concept once it is pushed into actual narrative functions in Lafferty, that is, when we ask, what is the monstrous doing? The Feral Lands offer a good example of where Petersen’s ideas are genuinely illuminating. His videos on Past Master  (1968) show how strong his close reading can be. We enter the Feal Lands as an ecomonstrous space, but soon the Feral Lands are defined by verticality—their mountain peaks and watery depths, which are spiritual imagery, the primordial waters of Genesis 1:2 and the heights of Genesis 8:4. If we think of the Feral Lands as they first appear to the characters, Petersen’s notion of the ecomonstrous has real power. When we turn to the devil-hydra, however, the concept risks reinforcing what Lafferty so often critiques as modern cultural amnesia. Plainly put, most of Lafferty’s monsters invite a clear binary moral judgment. Most of his real monsters are, in fact, devils, with the consequences being that the ecomonstrous is rarely free of the gravity well of the ethicomonstrous. It is within that moral field that Lafferty’s creatures take shape, their forms becoming legible through theological absolutes rather than through morally neutral environmental forces. It how they reveal themes to Thomas More in total darkness when the Nine tell him about the back of the tapestry, the conspiracy behind Astrobe’s politics. The book has two conspiracies: the false one of Proctor, Foreman, and Kingmaker, and the real one of the Nine. Lafferty uses ecomonstrous aporia apocalyptically, as a way of recovering a renewed ethicomonstrous perception, which takes place in Chapter 10. I would also want to question Section V (“Implications”), particularly Devourment and Sympoiesis. I think Petersen tends to see consumption in Lafferty as metaphysically non-hostile and creative. It is necessary for the New Materialist flow of the world. For other, unrelated reasons, Ferguson sees it similarly. Consider eating in Lafferty, an obsessive topic for him. Eating is a major Lafferty theme, a complicated image, and it is a source of ideas for Lafferty. He wrote exceptionally well about it. On the moral side, we can imagine a y-axis. It ranges from the maw of Ouden (a little higher up are the threats made by Snuffles) to the Eucharistic meal that happens right off stage after the end of Arrive at Easterwine  (1971). Aurelia (1982) is a novel of homilies organized around meals. There is also a satirical x-axis. It can be farcical, as in the Big Breakfast of Space Chantey  (1968). It can be biting, as in “Oh, Those Trepidatious Eyes!” It can be an acid bath, as in “ Pleasures and Palaces .” The great example of consumption as something that is not transformative and only minimally satirical is, of course, Ouden, followed by the thieving bears . Their consumption is annihilative. Alongside the consumption of the devil-hydra’s brains in Past Master  and the idea of using Thomas More as “bait,” their attacks are instances of violent spiritual warfare and domination, not ecological aporia. The point seems to be that the dialectic has moved beyond ecomonstrous aporia. Thomas More himself says so in the devil-hydra scene. What has happened is allegory, Lafferty’s Thomas More belongs more Middle Ages than the early Renaissance. The antagonist is the Henry VIII of Lafferty’s Cobbett , Chesterton , and Belloc . Past Master is as much an assault on Protestantism as it is on utopia, the two being connected for Lafferty, something that has gone unrecognized. But the point of allegories is that they convey ethical information. They disclose, not withdraw. It is the medieval view that nature itself is a book to be read. When Petersen looks at nature in Lafferty, he sees a sacramental ontology rooted in biodiversity and divine plenitude connected on one side to OOO . I agree with him about plenitude, but then he freezes nature as vibrancy-tenebrity. I also see something sacramental, but it looks a little different to me because it does not end there. It becomes a specific literary variation of the dogmatic sacrament of Transubstantiation, grotesque counterfuguration , used as a weapon to master the enemy. It is post-aporetic. Aporia is preliminary. Revelation is final.

Over the last year of reading Lafferty, I’ve repeatedly found myself adjusting my assumptions about what he is actually saying. I thought I’d post something brief on three areas where my thinking has changed. What has me thinking about this is the Catholic American writer Donna Tartt . Someone once said that she liked Tartt more than O'Connor because O'Connor finds her artistic solutions in the catechism in a way that Tartt doesn't. Lafferty (he was, weirdly, O’Connor’s senior), O’Connor, and Tartt: three prickly southern Catholics. First, it has become increasingly clear to me that Lafferty flirted with quite radical ideas in soteriology. He consistently kept his mind open to, if not outright universalism, at least extensions of grace that most other Catholic fiction writers have been unwilling to explore in their art. Second, he was more open to future changes in ecclesiastical organization than I had previously allowed. I now think it is entirely plausible that he leaves it intentionally ambiguous whether Finnegan could be a pope, even if the narrative itself stacks the deck against taking that possibility too literally. At first, I thought that was absurd, having read his nonfiction and most of his short stories. But he was willing to imagine a world in which two popes could exist, the pope of Astrobe functioning as both a metropolitan and a co-pontiff. His trickster side extended to being clever about what the Magisterium is committed to upholding and what is improbable but open, which complicates his traditionalism. Finally, the influence of Origen on Lafferty was deeper and more enduring than I had realized. What Gene Wolfe told Dan Knight about patristics was correct. It sent me back to Origen, and, again, it is a sad fact that a catalogue of Lafferty’s library was not made. A lot will always come down to inference from obiter dicta and allusions in the canon. This complicates any straightforward Thomistic reading of his thought. In the end, he comes across as more Augustinian than Thomistic, even though Thomistic metaphysical categories tend to function as the default settings throughout much of his work, and I don’t see the need to modify much. Lafferty was the product of an Augustinian formation impressed by Leonine neo-scholasticism, and this shows everywhere. It is now unclear to me whether this makes the metaphysics of Argo incoherent or, minimally, impossible to model consistently. A note on housecleaning. I like to make things. One of my hobbies is painting miniatures and gaming with my weekly group, and my workspace is always a mess, as is the blog. I've added some digital tools I hope will be helpful for those who want to study or revisit Lafferty. The blog menu at the top now scrolls. Resources added that are more user-friendly.

First, a table that lays out the plot of Space Chantey (1968), then some thoughts about Lafferty's Lay . When Gospel-trumpeter, surrounded With long-eared rout, to battle sounded, And pulpit, drum ecclesiastic, Was beat with fist, instead of a stick; Then did Sir Knight abandon dwelling, And out he rode a-colonelling. That's Hudibras , Samuel Butler’s scathing seventeenth-century takedown of Cromwell's England. But they sound a lot like Lafferty. There is playful savagery and a sharp-elbowed rhythm that cuts and capers—and there is Lafferty’s beloved a-prefixing. My academic background is in classics and 18th-century British literature—the great age of the heroic couplet. Dryden and Pope brought the form to its pinnacle. Today, most students despise it and struggle to endure it for any length of time. The decline of the heroic couplet is a long, complicated, sad story, but one thing is certain: Lafferty loved it. He loved every kind of couplet. The usual shade thrown at early 18th-century poetry is that it is versified prose. And the period's obsession with the heroic couplet at times led to aesthetic absurdity. Infamously, Dryden wanted to make Paradise Lost rhyme. The gossipy John Aubrey wrote that Dryden "went to [Milton] to have leave to put his Paradise Lost into a Drama in Rhyme. Mr. Milton received him civilly, and told him that he would give him leave to tag his verses." Pope’s translations of Homer stand out as another. Despite such excesses, the heroic couplet is one of the sharpest intellectual weapons English poetry ever devised. It is concise and epigrammatic; it can be both logical and persuasive. Its balance makes it suited to the elevated and to the mock-serious; and it delivers a savage satirical bite like no other—because it can hover with its pauses--its caesurae--before it hits its target in slow motion. No wonder Lafferty loved it. Even when he strayed from the heroic couplet, he typically favored other couplet forms. If most Space Chantey readers are anything like my students, they probably grow impatient with its couplets and skim past them as so much versified prose. But I think Lafferty is doing something more with them than versifying the novel: he is using them to generate the novel as he goes. He tells us so in a sly way: “Whence the doggerel, good Bramble?” Roadstrum asked. “It’s a popular epic composing itself these days,” said Bramble. “It’s called The Lay of Road-Storm , and it’s about yourself.” To overlook the couplets Lafferty put into Space Chantey is to miss much of the book’s charm. Someday, I’d like to understand how Lafferty's use of the couplet shaped his creative process. We know he was an obsessive rhymester, compulsively composing doggerel in his head as he walked, and something about the couplet as a form—with his signature chomping consonants—seemed to supercharge his imagination. Part of this is likely the violent juxtaposition the form enables; another part is its logical structure, which thrives on devices like antithesis and was suited his temperament. A few months ago, I sat down and wrote glosses for the Lay of Road-Storm . Here are the first 50 lines. I mention this in the glosses, but notice how Lafferty tweaks the noses of the heroic hexameters of Homer and Virgil with his choice of iambic hexameter. That is subtle, funny, and very Lafferty. 1. The Lay of Road-Storm from the ancient Chronicles A space epic in the form of a shanty. A galactic chronicle of Captain Roadstrum—flawed yet heroic. Encounters: Lotophage’s temptations, Lamos ogres, Siren-Zo’s song, Aeaea’s witchery. High-stakes gambling, spectral illusions, treacherous asteroid belts, the Hellpepper escape. Themes of myth, storytelling, and human defiance. Final act: a supernova death paralleling Dante’s version of Odysseus’ death. 2. We give you here, Good Spheres and Cool-Boy Conicals, Playful address to the reader. "Good Spheres" and "Cool-Boy Conicals" This is scale with slang: planets, conical spaceships, and flight paths. 3. And perils pinnacled and parts impossible Greek epic: epainos praise, kelos immortal fame, and alazoneia arrogance."Perils pinnacled": towering, extreme dangers. "Parts impossible": surreal, fantastical realms. Evokes epic themes—praise, fame, arrogance. Sets tone: grand adventure, boundary-breaking exploits. Playing with alliterative poetry connotations. Beowulf. Gawain. 4. And every word of it the sworn-on Gosipel. Parodies the sacredness of Greek epic traditions. Pun on epic oral poetry as high gossip. 5. Lend ear while things incredible we bring about Direct appeal to the audience in the style of oral poetry. But the muse is absent. Tale will be incredible in both senses—no sacred song. 6. And Spacemen dead and deathless yet we sing about:— Immortal names achieved through great deeds: Achilles and Odysseus. 7. And some were weak and wan, and some were strong enough, Juxtaposes human frailty and resilience, recurring theme in epic tradition. Lafferty uses Scriblerian techniques: “wan” and “enough” sink “weak” and “strong.’ 8. And some got home, but damn it took them long enough! Nod to the prolonged, trial-filled journey of Odysseus in The Odyssey. 9. Where fiddlers scree’d and Rabelaisians loped, it was, Allusion to fiddler on Lotophage, a Lafferty stand-in. Rabelaisian excess, grotesque humor, and the carnivalesque. 10. And Maybe Jones had walked the streets and hoped it was. Peripatetic archetype, perpetual searching. Odyssey and epic vs picaresque, Lafferty’s rhetorical strategy. 11. So glad a land, you’d never find a grouser there. Bogus utopia. Past Master. Another alliterative hemistich verse joke. Sly rhetorical antithesis: glad a land, you’d never find a grouser . . . 12. They said a man could really throw a rouser there! Litotes. Not Bacchic revels but lotus eaters. Laffertian pun: “rouser” as big bash, arousal, and waking up lotus eaters. 13. Ah well, ’twas good enough for Lotophagians, Recognition of Bacchic/Lotus contrast; a dig at the Lotophagians 14. But how about the horny hopping shaggy uns? Roadstrum’s crew hop from planet to planet in spacecraft called “hornets” Shaggy “whisker clocks” on crewman. Sexual joke: horny shaggy ‘uns. Why they went to Lotophage. 15. How turned the bright-eyed crew to sleepy gooney guys? Gooney = foolish but sailor slang, appropriately: Sleepy Sailor Bar. Gooney = also a name for albatross. Astronautical. 16. How have a high old night with afternooney guys? Always afternoon on Lotophage. Triple pun: having grand time, getting high, needing to break the lethargy and get out of planetary atmosphere. 17. All lusty liquor with a crystal cask for it, 18. Whatever wished one only has to ask for it. Travesty of Matthew 7:7 “Ask, and it shall be given.” 19. Tall pleasures piled in infinite variety, Peri-bathos. Crew are called “tall ones” in Chapter One. “Piled” up in slumber. 20. Raw rolling gluttony without satiety: Inferno, Canto 6, and Purgatorio , Canto 23. 21. And under sheen than all things else is awesomer Caustic irony. 22. A golden worm that gnaws and gnaws and gnaws some more. “for their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched” golden light of afternoon. William Blake’s “The Sick Rose.” 23. One needs for picture of the Laestrygonians Ogres martial values closer to Greek figures in epic poetry than are the hornem crewmen. 24. All hump-backed cuss-words and vile polyphonians. Sexual invective: the “hump-backed cuss-words.” 25. “We’ll cry a warning here though we be hung for it!” Sets up joke in next line. 26. The fact is, not a crewman had the tongue for it. Crew doesn’t speak Old Norse, so lacks tongue, but crew will have tongues cut out Chiastic pattern: tongueless at beginning of episode and at end of episode. 27. Those boys are rough, nor steel nor steinn can stay with them; Steel and stone but also a drinking stein = big breakfast reference. 28. You’d better have visceral blood to play with them. Bloody guts to spill one’s blood, as the dead rise each morning in Valhalla to fight again. 29. That human meat and mind should ever rout the things! Roadstrum’s lack of Odysseus’ cunning. 30. We trim to decent measure these giganticals Double meaning: “measure” refers to sizing up the giants and to the poetic meter of the lines. Lafferty is employing a doggerel iambic hexameter, parodying the quantitative hexameter of Greek and Roman epic poetry, rather than heroic iambic pentameter. This fits with the longer alliterative line. Other options for long mock-poetry would be Hudibrastics. or rollicking tetrameter. 31. And couch the tale in shaggy-people canticles. “Shaggy dog” story--meandering and humorous style. Canticles are part of the liturgical tradition—the Magnificat, the Benedictus, the Nunc Dimittis, etc. The “Gosipel.” 32. “The little bug has got the glitter eyes of him, Bjorn’s amusement at Roadstrum. 33. You can’t go by the pepper-picking size of him. Small can belie great strength, likening Roadstrum to David vs Goliath in 1 Samuel 17. Also joke for the re-reader: Hellpepper episode. 34. We look and hoot, ‘That must be only half of him.’ Bjorn mocking Roadstrum’s comparatively small height. 35. We laugh at him and laugh at him and laugh at him. Hubris. Bjorn mocks Roadstrum’s lack of timē and kleos. Lafferty is mocking epic. 36. He be tall eater and a taller topian, Refers to Roadstrum at “big breakfast.” Bjorn is watches him eat. “Topian” = the Rabelaisian excess of the giant Pantagruel and drunken revelry, toper. 37. No mind the little fellow’s microscopian. 38. We pitch a party, sling the dangest dangeroo. “Dogfight” on the rock slabs and the aristeiai of Bjorn/Pluckett and Bjorn/Roadstrum. 39. Whoop, whoop and holler! He’s a hero-hangeroo!” Bjorn’s excitement over Roadstrum’s fighting spirit. Does Roadstrum fight like a kangaroo? 40. They took to air all bloodily and retchingly, The Laestrygonians mutilate the spacemen, cutting out their tongues. The spacemen choke on blood, horror. Not heroic behavior: wretchedly. 41. They made new tongues, but didn’t make them fetchingly, The “false tongue” will become a motif, i.e. the computer’s False Tongue! The legendary deceptiveness of Odysseus travestied. 42. And flew through chartless skies where none had fled before; Evokes the uncharted journeys of The Odyssey and The Aeneid. While Aeneas flees Troy with Virgil crafting justifications through Aphrodite and Creusa, here, flight is stripped of any heroic pretense—mere running away. An escalation of bathos. 43. Whatever came, at least they’d all been dead before. 44. But one thing worked, whatever else might nix the things, Hondstarfer’s name means “hand work,” fittingly as he has repaired the ship. 45. That hammer-handling kid had really fixed the things. Hammer-handling Hondstarfer = ingenuity of Homeric H’s: Hermes and Hephaestus. 46. All bloody luck they ever got away like that, Parallels Odysseus’ reliance on luck, with “bloody” adding a literal note due to the mutilated tongues and the gore of the escape. Bloody as a curse, literally a vile polyphonian sound. 47. They sure did never want another day like that! 48. And Roadstrum shucked another layer fretfully: Shuck: remove; shuck, deceive, i.e. what gets Odysses in so much trouble: false tongue. Roadstrum’s stature as a giant hero. 49. One gives up giantizing most regretfully. A case of amphiboly: 'giantizing' refers both to killing giants and striving for greatness in the Homeric sense. 50. All lost in space, the hide-bound inner side of it, Nod to the Lost in Space TV series 1965–1968. Laffertian pun: 'hide-bound' as being unable to change; trapped in the asteroid belt; 'bound for the hide' of the space calf; and physically bound to the hide via lassos.

"There's a kind of group amnesia that blocks out the details. But it didn’t end in Armageddon." I have pet theories about how Lafferty handles consensus reality, especially in the two novellas in Apocalyses , where it takes on its most nightmarish shape. What I want to do here is to explain how it works in those works, or at least how I think it works, as plainly and neutrally as I can. I’ll do this in three parts. The first will focus on Enniscorthy Sweeny. The second will turn to Sadaliotis. The third will look at how the idea of consensus reality differs between the two, which is important. These are dense, intricate texts. One could revise endlessly. But my notes feel close enough for now. I hope they prove useful to anyone who wants to dig deep into the writing. In The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny , a pivotal event for understanding the big picture occurs in 1910, when Dr. Henry Devonian writes a mathematical paper that reveals the nature of the world. The paper introduces a system of equations—General, Special, and Particular—that describe the hidden mechanics of time. At the center of Devonian's work is the General Equation. It shows that each “Time-Enclave,” or Consensus-Time, depends on a single “Crux-Individual.” If that person is removed, the entire era collapses. Chicago mathematicians Grogg, McDearmott, and Quartermas solve the system, with their results pointing to sixteen-year-old Enniscorthy Sweeny as the key figure of their age. This discovery explains why the novella revolves around him and why his fate holds such importance. Significantly, Devonian’s General and Special Equations include a set of “Protect-Our-Own” corollaries. These give rise to an invisible force known as the Friends-of-the-Catastrophes. Their role is to protect the Crux-Individual and to ensure that predicted disasters unfold on schedule. This will be important for much of the ancillary action, which can become confusing. When Grogg attempts to kill Sweeny, he is shot first. The moment reveals the corollary in action. Sweeny’s operas (especially Armageddon I  and II ), his plays, and even his stray “notions” are blueprints predicted by the Devonian Equations and appear to shape the course of reality. The theological drama comes to the fore when, in a letter, Sweeny quotes Pope Kyril I as describing them as “blueprints... for diabolical destruction." Micro Picture Another example. A casual caricature Sweeny draws of a friend’s jaw ends up reshaping the friend’s actual face. These stories gain power as they are amplified by mass media such as print, radio, and opera, and by the enthusiasm of Armageddon cults that spread them widely. In time, entire audiences come to believe the operas are real. One result is the rise of the World Peace League, a sect of a million people who genuinely remember a global war that no one else recalls. When belief reaches critical mass (when more people, animals, plants, rocks, and machines accept one chain of events over any other), that story hardens into reality. The result is a stabilized Variant World, such as the battlefield visions presented in Armageddon I . Sweeny, now acting as the "recording angel," writes down the new facts. This act prompts Consensus-Time to retroactively restitch itself, making the altered past appear as though it had always existed. Because the simultaneous presence of multiple narrative tracks would destabilize both minds and machines, a state of amnesia is triggered to suppress all memory of alternate timelines. If this suppression fails, physical systems such as machinery and human brains begin to break down. In some cases, they explode. To keep the entire narrative loop running, we get Marshals Mosco, Tosco, and Rosco. They are described as “hellish fiends” who place an invisible iron collar around Sweeny’s neck that tightens whenever he stops producing visions. At the same time, a group of six detectives (who later merge into a single representative entity named Sextus) protects Sweeny from human assassins. The system has two possible failure points. One is a Time-Collapse, which happens if the Crux is killed. In that case, the entire era disappears. The other is a period known as the Empty Years. This occurs when no single story takes hold, and history itself stalls. One example is the span from 1964 to 1972. The plot, in brief: Devonian’s equations identify a single human as the focal point. That person begins to imagine stories. As belief spreads, one story crosses a critical threshold. Reality then rewrites itself to match. Contradictions vanish from memory. Meanwhile, demon-mathematician enforcers work to keep the cycle going. But if belief weakens or the Crux dies, the entire structure collapses. That is the high-level map of consensus reality in The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny : Creation -> Amplification -> Solidification -> Enforcement. Macro Picture

This post is a first attempt to chart Melchisedech Duffey’s peculiar sexual life and aspects of antisemitism in More Than Melchisedech , situating them within the blog’s broader exploration of neglected sides of Lafferty's fiction. It confines itself to presenting textual evidence, without advancing interpretation beyond highlighting the link between Melchisedech Duffey’s sexuality and antisemitic tropes in the Argo legend . In the novel, Duffey is blackmailed for pedophilia by Hugo Stone, a character identified with Absalom Stein, who is described as having a wealthy and lurid Jewishness. During Duffey's time running a bookstore in Chicago, Hugo Stone (we are told he is always seen with a camera) photographs Duffey in sexual situations with young girls (such as Mary Frances Rattigan and Mary Catherine Carruthers) on an old black leather sofa. This takes place when the girls are around eight to ten years old, with Lafferty saying that Duffey had "dirty fun" and played the "funny uncle" with them. The photographic records are compiled and later presented in a portfolio by Stein/Stone's associates. Obviously, Stein and Stone are etymological cognates. To belabor this, Stein and names ending in -stein (like Goldstein  or Einstein ) are often Jewish surnames, though the word itself just means “stone” in German. These names became common among Ashkenazi Jews in Central and Eastern Europe during the late 18th and 19th centuries, when governments required Jewish families to adopt fixed, German-style surnames. Many chose (or were assigned) last names based on German words describing nature ( Stein , Blum , Berg , etc.) or ornamental compounds like Rosenstein  (“rose stone”). So while Stein  is not Jewish linguistically, it became strongly associated with Jewish heritage through historical naming practices in German-speaking regions. The Jewish Stein-centered group attempting the blackmail of Duffey wants him to allow them to join and incorporate their ideas into his publication, The Crock , the publication at the center of the The Devil is Dead trilogy. If this is a Jewish conspiracy , then it is an attempt to infiltrate an unofficial organ of the Catholic Church. Of Duffey, Cazey Szymansky in Archipelago  says, “He is a Centrist. He is the only member of the Catholic Center Party of America. He is the Party. d'Allesandro, Mary Frances, Demetrio Glauch, and myself are his best prospects. If he could fully enlist us he would have a party of five. Smaller parties have done well in Europe. But it is lonesome to be a party of one. For context, it is worth noting that Shirley Israel and Ben Israel are part of the circle of friends connected to the portfolio man who confronts Duffey. Shirley Israel, in particular, is mentioned in a disparaging news article that labels her a “nefarious Jewess” following a drunken incident she provoked. More notably, the only photograph in the blackmail portfolio depicting Duffey engaged in a sexual act shows him having intercourse with Shirley Israel. “Well, what are you going to do with them?” Duffey asked stiffly. “Oh, we hope that we will not do anything with them,” the man said. “It is just that some of us want to join with you in the excellent little magazine you are running, and you have not welcomed us with open arms. We do not want to join in from hope of money gain. We will bring in money, not take it out. And we will enlarge the magazine. But it is an idea magazine, and we want our ideas to be in it.” “Who are you going to blackmail me to?” “Oh, to your wife, and to others.” “You're wasting your time,” Duffey said. “My wife can read my mind. She knows the things I have done. These things cannot be held against me, however they may look. I have confessed the few guilty things among them and I have been absolved of them. And any guilt I ever had in them, either in fact or in appearance, is gone now. It is all past.” “Some of these pictures, you must know, are not too old.” “Some of my confessings and absolvings are not too old either.” “Ah, but will your wife absolve you?” “Certainly she will. I will explain to her that I am clear of all these.” I. Childhood and Early Purity (Approx. Pre-1915) Approximate Age / Period Early Childhood Duffey lived in "purity" during his school years along with his companions. He was exposed to rigorous definitions of chastity: "Chastity is the lily among virtues and makes men almost equal to angels". Youth Duffey "would suffer a little corruption now and then" but never rejected the core definitions of integrity and chastity. Age 3 Duffey gave away his first talisman (representing a special gift or formation) to an Italian man selling cakes out of a hokey-pokey pushcart; this was to bring about or create the first of the persons who would make up the Duffey Nation. Age 12 Duffey began boarding school, the beginning of his young manhood by his own count. Boarding School Era Sebastian Hilton claimed to have had an affair with a countess. Duffey, by dipping into Sebastian's mind, found that this countess was "now twelve years old". Duffey later prophesied he would meet her and that she would be his close friend. II. St. Louis (1915-1917) and Early Exploitation of Minors During the years Duffey ran the Rounders' Club (circa age 15–17), he had several questionable relationships and activities involving minors, though his primary romantic interest was older. Approximate Age / Period Age 15 (May 1915) Duffey met Gretchen Sisler, who was almost nine. He told her he was almost sixteen. He impressed her with his magic, created a gold coin for her. He said, "You are my luck, you are my love," and kissed her. Gretchen's mother, Lucille Sisler, later worked for Duffey, and people called her Duffey's mother-in-law because Gretchen had told everybody that Duffey belonged to her. Age 15–17 Duffey had sexualized interactions with Gretchen Sisler on her family's sofa, described as them "carrying on together on the old Sisler living room sofa." Age 15–17 Duffey associated closely with Evelyn London (a Dublin girl), who was "About ten years older than Duffey." She called him "my boy, you are my love, you are my prince" and played with his hair. Age 15–17 Duffey developed a close, passionate, but bridled relationship with his step-sister, Mary Louise Byrne, whom he called his "anima made animate" and "flame-red part of his own soul." He later worried if the "love between us that is a plain outrage, but should it be bridled?" She said it must be and would be. Age 15–17 Mary Louise decided to bestow her friend, Elizabeth Keegan (Beth), upon Duffey to redirect his passion. Duffey realized he was looking at Beth "as at a work of art" and kissed her or "fumble[d] with her or [sat] on her lap because he didn’t know what to say". Age 16 (Late 1916) Mary Louise urged Duffey to "Make love to her more, romp on her more, kiss her more" with Beth Keegan. However, the physical interactions were described as "all joke-romps and joke-rides and joke-kisses." Beth, who was physically developed, was "only seventeen" and would turn eighteen the next month; Duffey was still sixteen. Age 15–17 Duffey had "sparky and elegant trolley car romances" while riding streetcars to his various classes. III. Hidden Years and Creation (1917–1923) This period defined his role as a magical father where physical reproduction was avoided in favor of talismanic creation. Approximate Age / Period Lost Years (1917–1923) Eleven of Duffey's twelve primary human persons (Animated Marvels) were conceived and born during these seven hidden years. This creation was achieved via talismans. Lost Years (Pre-1920/1921) Duffey gave a talisman to Gabriel Szymansky for his unborn son, Casey. He also gave one to Lily Koch for her younger sister (Letitia); this "rib-shaped" talisman was a special case and "did not count in the primary twelve." Alternate Future (The Argo) Duffey's "very real death" occurred during this period in a future scenario (in Neustria), where he was cut to bones by the three slant-faced killers. His spirit lingered, and his ashes were put in an urn. After this death, he gained the "Ambiguity of the Flesh" where his flesh was real but also "ashes in the can," lasting throughout his married life. End of Lost Years (1923) Duffey came out of the "Sea of Lost Years," feeling "twenty-three years old and no age is happier than that." IV. Marriage and Chicago Golden Age (1925–1946) Upon his reappearance, Duffey swiftly found his wife (Letitia, his "bonus" creation) and established his Golden Age. This era is notable for the continued sexualized interactions with minors in his bookstore, which resulted in blackmail. Approximate Age / Period Age 25 (1925) Duffey met Charlotte Mullens (a mendacious midget impersonating a nine-year-old girl) on a train. She "played footsie and kneesie and kissie with Duffey." Duffey "kissed Charlotte quite a bit." Age 25 Charlotte (the midget) confessed to Duffey that she ran a "badger game" where she would come out of the bathroom "toweling myself in the buff" to entice men, allowing her mother to bring in witnesses and blackmail the men for violating "little nine year old girls". Charlotte claimed she "always have a lot of carnality to confess." Age 25 Duffey experienced an "overriding compulsion" to find his destined wife. He met Lily Koch, who kissed him and said, "I almost hate to give you up." Age 25 Duffey met Letitia Koch (Lily's sister and his "bonus" creation) and realized she was the moth he was seeking. They decided to marry "the day after tomorrow." Letitia was one of the "supreme pieces in Duffey's Uncollectable Art Collection." Age 25–35 (Golden Age) Duffey wrestled "very young friends" who came to his bookstore, including Mary Frances Rattigan, Mary Catherine Carruthers, Mary Jean, Ethyl Ellenberger, and Margaret Stone, from the time they were "eight or nine years old." Age 25–35 (Golden Age) Duffey wrestled these little girls on an "old, black leather sofa in the bookstore." Age 25–35 (Golden Age) These interactions were called "hearty fun" by Duffey, but the narrator noted "hell is made out of such hearty fun". Wrestling Mary Frances and Ethyl together felt safe, but "maybe it wasn't all right when Mary Francis was there by herself." Age 25–35 (Golden Age) The activity "probably wasn't all right" with Mary Jean (who was a "hot little vixen from her childhood") and with Mary Catherine Carruthers (who was "in love with Duffey"). These relationships continued for "about ten years." Age 25–35 (Golden Age) Duffey was "blackmailed" for these activities after Hugo Stone (a boy who often carried a camera) took photos of Duffey "having dirty fun" with the girls and "playing the funny uncle with them." Duffey himself acknowledged he "should have been horse-whipped for such things." Age 25–46 Duffey "loved" many ladies, including his wife Letitia, her sister Lily, her mother Elinore, his sister Mary Louise, his "old girl" Beth Keegan, and several younger girls from the bookstore. He loved them "seriously and he loved them clownishly, and he may even have loved them illicitly, even Letitia." Age 25–46 Duffey kissed the Girl Countess Margaret Stone (who was Sebastian's twelve-year-old countess from his mind) when she later appeared in Chicago, noting she was "special". He also carried on a "little bit" with her (now grown) and the mendacious midget Charlotte Garfield. V. Post-Letitia Life and Final Proposals (Post-1946) After Letitia's death, Duffey (whose age begins oscillating) continued to be pursued, often by his past interests. Approximate Age / Period Post-Letitia's Death Lily Koch told Duffey she loved him and "will do anything for you," offering to set up their own Transylvania if he would marry her for "fifty years or so." She also noted her dowry had tripled. Post-Letitia's Death The Countess Margaret Stone (whose kind does not reach puberty until after age fifty) proposed marriage and asked him to come to Transylvania with her, saying they could not marry until after mid-century but she had loved him when she was young. Duffey declined, saying, "Ask me again in fifty years." Post-Letitia's Death Charlotte Garfield offered Duffey the ability to have "sons of my body" (including "nineteen year old and full-grown sons") because she could change families every few years, offering him a "prodigious time of it." Duffey declined her offer. Post-Letitia's Death Mary Catherine Carruthers (who had been in love with him since childhood) came to him, reminding him that she was now an "old girl" (about 40–50) and that she had once asked him to marry her if Letitia died. End of Normal Life Duffey proposed to Monica Murray Stranahan (Charley Murray's sister), urging her to marry him because she would inherit a good sum. She declined, believing he would give the money away. VI. Context of Sexual Degradation Sexual degradation occurring during Duffey's era, although not involving Duffey directly. Period General Context (Pre-1946) Father Blevins stated that he gave "instructional experience in Fornicational Intercourse" to high school girls and to grade school girls as part of their total education. General Context (Pre-1946) Pornography was being introduced into texts geared toward the "level of six-year-old and seven-year-old reading ability" as part of a "leveling process."   VII. Absalom Stein and Blackmailing Duffey Element of Blackmail Detail Absalom Stein's Connection and Jewish Context The Photographer / Incriminating Pictures The blackmail attempt used a portfolio of pictures showing Duffey in compromising situations with young girls. The person Duffey suspects of taking these pictures—over a long period, using a hidden camera in the bookstore—was the young boy, Hugo Stone. Duffey later insists that Hugo Stone (damn that kid anyhow!) was the same person as Absalom Stein. This suggests that the origins of the blackmail materials stemmed from Stein’s actions during Duffey’s Chicago era. Stein is described as having a "wealthy and lurid Jewishness" and is an "Israelite in whom there was much guile." Shirley Israel’s Role (The Entrapment) Shirley Israel (and Ben Israel) were categorized as "slippery people" in Chicago. The portfolio contained pictures of Duffey with various girls, but the only "flagrante picture" was of Duffey and Shirley Israel, indicating she was an agent in a classic "badger game trick, a sneak attack." Shirley Israel was connected to the Jewish context through public denigration. Following a chaotic gathering where she served a powerful liquor, a newspaper article written by Rollo McSorley claimed he was kicked by a "flying mule" and mentioned that the drink was given by a "nefarious Jewess." Shirley Israel was an active rival, spreading rumors that other salons were superior to Duffey's. Motive for the Blackmail The blackmailing group, which included some of the slippery people, sought to gain influence and participation in Duffey’s publication, The Crock, stating they wanted their "ideas to be in it" and promising to bring money. Earlier, Absalom Stein was identified as being the "infamous Communist" or "Chicago red" under the name Hugo Stone. This earlier political identity suggests a motive consistent with the blackmailers’ demands to install their "ideas" (presumably radical ones, given the context of the The Crock being taken over by a "group") into Duffey's sphere of influence. Absalom Stein later claimed he traded this "old soul of mine — the soul of Hugo Stone the Chicago red" to Casey Szymansky. Related Jewish Figures Shirley Israel was at the party alongside Ben Israel and was later seen with a "Nathan and Shirley Stone." Absalom Stein is directly related to Margaret Stone, who is described as being Italian and Jew, and his cousin. Margaret Stone also refers to Stein as "that damned Jew!" when discussing his actions. Stein's daughter is Rebeka Stein, a Jew who attended a Catholic academy for a "more narrow education."

“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.” — Franz Kafka, in a letter to Oskar Pollak (January 27, 1904) I'm under the weather, taking a sick day, and thinking about The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny . This will be a response to a great Thomas Flight video I watched on YouTube. In my professional life, I push for colleagues to embrace new technologies, a stance that can be quite polarizing. Many of my colleagues take a “burn-it-with-fire” view of recent changes in the digital humanities, and while I understand their concerns, I try to weigh to both perspectives. Over the last year, though, it seems that something has changed. More are beginning to recognize that the lid is off, and we are entering a new age of digital production, one unlike anything that came before, very unlike, say, what Walter Benjamin called art in the age of mechanical reproduction. One of the most unnerving aspects of the spread of AI technology, to me, is that billions of quasi-aesthetic artifacts now exist that never had any chance of possessing an aura to lose. Ideas like Plato’s cave and gnostic paranoia become exigent concerns in a world with SORA, as people slip into their idio kosmoi . Along with that, Lafferty’s insight into consensus and its relationship to art looks less idiosyncratic and more prophetic. This is a primary reason The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny  is a great work, despite what it excludes. In Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice , the Canadian writer J. F. Martel gives co nsensus an extraordinarily important role in the relation between art and artifice, arguing that art differs from artifacts. The latter are created to serve Consensus. Art is defined by its power to disrupt the ordinary rhythm of mental and biological routine. When it appears, it appears as an interruption, breaking the habits to which humans have been conditioned. Martel sees these habits as grounded in evolution. Lafferty would have disagreed, but he perhaps would have seen the habits as part of the amnesia that concerned him. The art and artifact distinction is one Sweeny plays with. Because of its nonutilitarian nature, art compels us to step outside the logic of means and ends—the mindset that reduces all things to utility. One of the aspects of Lafferty that I admire is his lack of investment in this kind of thing. While mindful of reputation, popularity, and the publication of his works, he stayed hopeful and was never grotesquely preoccupied with such matters. He said he started to write because it was like playing with crayons; he wanted to leave his mark. And he said for many years writing was all fun, and after it became only half fun, he stopped. In his letters, one finds that he wants to see his works out in the world, being shared and enjoyed, but he was content whether his various contacts published them or didn’t. He left it to Virginia. There is something radically nonutilitarian about Lafferty, even if he enjoyed his paychecks, as anyone would. When Martel argues that every authentic encounter with art halts the automatic flow of experience and demands a new mode of attention, I see a connection to my experience in reading Lafferty. Few writers who appear so demotic on the surface are so intent on arresting perception. For Martel, art suspends the discursive mind and lifts it beyond the egoic world we normally inhabit. In this stillness, the logic of subject and object, action and reaction, cause and effect, is interrupted. The mind, accustomed to motion and analysis, is suddenly, and productively, stopped. It is drawn into imaginal awareness. The self’s boundaries blur, and a more expansive perception takes hold. Martel’s arguments have a Kantian flavor, but Lafferty, I think, aims to create just this effect by tossing readers into the oceanic. The idea is that beauty has a physical impact. It intensifies the interruption we experience in the presence of art. The ancient Greeks used the term aisthou —meaning “to perceive” and “to gasp”—to describe this shock of the beautiful. Beauty intrudes upon the body, overriding the biological algorithms of self-preservation. It cuts off the mechanical sequence of cause and effect. In its presence, perception and emotion are fused. This is what we mean when we say that we don’t see beauty but are momentarily seized by it. Then there is Martel’s argument that art is static in the sense that it suspends the discursive mind and elevates it to a plane of reality broader than the egoic world we usually inhabit. Laffert exploits this in endings that aren’t endings, most famously in the suspension that ends Past Master (1968). Be quiet. We hope . This momentary stillness interrupts the logic of subject and object, of action and reaction, of cause and effect. As Lafferty put it in Past Master , “The shapes they take are both subjective and objective. One can shape them a little with one’s mind.” The mind, accustomed to movement and analysis, finds itself suddenly stopped. It is drawn into a space of direct, imaginal awareness. The boundaries of the self blur, and a more expansive form of perception briefly takes hold. Martel’s arguments here have a Kantian flavor, but I think Lafferty aims to create something like this in readers by tossing them into the oceanic. As Martel points out, the ancient Greeks used the term aisthou (meaning “to perceive” and “to gasp”) to describe this shock. It might be why there is the beautiful and the sublime in Lafferty of Bergson's idea of the comic and the mechanical . As I've written about on the blog, for Bergson, the comic arises when the living becomes mechanical, when flexibility gives way to rigidity and automatism within human behavior. And why, when the boundaries of the self blur in the schizo-gash, and apocalyptic perception briefly takes hold, it tends to create laughter and horror, and not infrequently both. In thinking about " Phoenic " and its question— Whence is this newness? —it also occurred to me that it is, in its way, a question about consensus. In consensus, nothing really new takes place, a point made brilliantly in Shannon Vallor's The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking (2024). All creativity is subordinated to replication and familiarity. That is what Martel calls artifice—work that sustains the trance by presenting reality as a closed system , where every meaning has already been assigned and every emotion predetermined. Because the record of the past is largely a record of consensus, I think Vallor is right when she writes, “ . . . our AI mirrors project a vision of human intelligence constructed entirely from the amalgamated data of humanity’s past. This is why our dependence on these mirrors for self-knowledge risks leaving us captive like Narcissus, unwilling to move forward and leave behind what the mirror shows. At the very moment when accelerating climate change, biodiversity collapse, and global political instability command us to invent new and wiser ways of living together, AI holds us frozen in place, fascinated by endless permutations of a reflected past that only the magic of marketing can disguise as the future.” The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny  is a minor masterpiece for the brilliance with which it takes up these questions. And while the ethical failure of its Holocaust denial is profound, that failure makes it, to me, an even more interesting piece of art in our troubling world: “The dreadful facsimile that this person makes will not ward off a dreadful reality. It will be the origin of that reality. It will be the invention of it. It will turn into that dreadful reality that will gobble up the world.”

“Laff, do you remember 'Johnny Crookedhouse,'" Barry Malzberg asked me once. ‘How could you have known, how could anyone have known?’ I gasped. ‘For my sins I was sometimes assigned to the slush piles when I worked for publishers,’ he said. ‘I don’t remember anything about it except the name, and I can never forget it. It was, it was—’ ‘The worst story ever written,’ we both said at once. No, of course there is no copy in existence. I hope not.” Being a big Barry Mazberg fan, I love that anecdote. It's true that “ Johnny Crookedhouse ” is not a good story. But it is an interesting one, in that it sets out an early attempt by Lafferty to explore what would become a major theme in his work: the Law of Intellectual Constancy. So yes, not great, but interesting. The unpublished “Great Green Goat” might be Lafferty’s worst story because it is neither good nor interesting. I’ll try to say why it doesn’t work after the plot. This time, Lafferty gives us a man later identified as Peter Potsworth. He comes home three days early to find the house in a state of chaos. This offends his meticulous standards. Outraged, he retrieves his automatic pistol, declaring, “This has to end… It will end tonight.” He goes to his wife's empty room, a scene of calmness in the midst of disorder, where clothes lie like fallen leaves. There are scattered candy wrappers. There is a dirty garden trowel. Peter eventually finds a rambling list she had been writing: “What will old Fussbudget do when he finds out that I let the fish die?” Peter’s investigation continues into the bathroom, where he finds a dead gopher and jars of writhing worms for the garden. All this fits his wife’s past behavior. The medicine chest looks like “a nest of witches.” Finally, Peter is shaken to discover his red toothbrush is wet—a violation he hates. His wife should be using her blue toothbrush. Determined to find his wife, Lila Lee, he phones her friends. They dismiss him with comments like, “Why don’t you wise up, Fussbudget?” Peter gets an answer when he receives a call from a woman with a “weirdly guttural disguised levantine voice.” Through the faux-Jewish shtick, she tells Peter that Lila is at Freddy Dinsmore’s house. Equipped with his pistol, Peter goes to Freddy’s. He uses a glass cutter to create a perfectly circular hole in the window, carefully pocketing the piece of glass so as not to be unseemly. Inside, he follows a trail of Lila’s carelessly discarded clothing (shoes, stockings, a red belt) upstairs. He flings open a door, eyes blazing and the automatic in his hand, to find Lila and Freddy together. But Peter isn’t raging because his wife has cuckolded him, so he mostly ignores Lila’s flimsy claim that Freddy is a newfound cousin. Instead, Peter criticizes Freddy’s untidiness, pointing to “your shirt on the bedpost and your pants on the floor.” Waving the pistol, Peter’s fury lands on its real target. He says to Lila, “Did you fire this today?” When she admits she killed a gopher with it, Peter sobs, “Then, by the great green goat, why didn’t you clean it?” He turns and leaves, leaving a bewildered Lila and a shaken Freddy. “Great Green Goat” is prenucleation Lafferty, and because the story world is so flat, Lafferty’s compensatory fabulation (his usual technique for creating interest in the absence of characters with much interiority) does not get off the ground. What makes this one such a failure, I think, is that when it comes to stories about infidelity, readers want psychology, and Lafferty’s approach to psychology is to exteriorize it. So one feels cheated. Here is a story about an affair with no emotional stakes, no introspection, no catharsis. There is nothing like a psychological portrait. The closest we get is Peter’s red toothbrush being gendered like a firetruck, and Lila Lee’s red belt, color-coded like a scarlet woman. Her own toothbrush is blue. The only other color in the story is green, which ceases to be the green of jealousy and becomes the grotty green of dirt and slovenliness, the Peter’s Great Green Goat, not Othello’s Green-Eyed Monster. I would go a little further. Peter Potsworth is not a man who values order if only because he is not a man at all; he is a completely flattened and trivialized metaphysical Principle of Order, a parody of Order leveled down into the neatness of an effete prig. His every action, from cutting a perfect circle in a glass door to his outrage over a messy room, is an unmediated expression of axiomatic neatness. His wife, Lila Lee, is not merely careless. She is less woman or wife than the principle of entropy itself, with her randomness and disorder as natural as fallen leaves. The story’s plot is a collision of non negotiable forces. The radical flatness is the plot. These are not characters in a realist story; they are Lafferty characters saddled with a situation that realist fiction never tires of worrying about, from Flaubert’s Madame Bovary  to Rooney’s Conversations with Friends . Because they are fairly typical Lafferty characters, they are incapable of much psychological change or real marital anguish, physical pain being Lafferty’s exteriorized version of psychological suffering. And there is no bloodsmell. Flat psychological interiority joined to flamboyant verbal expressivity normally allows Lafferty to pull off plot effects other writers cannot. In this story the flatness becomes a liability. He wagers that the brevity will work in its favor, yet it does not. The distancing and defamiliarizing techniques Lafferty trades in simply block conventional reader engagement, and they damage the story’s own possibilities for compensatory fabulation, which appear only weakly exteriorized in the silly opposition of being neat and being messy. That kind of self reflexive move works in Lafferty’s bold story worlds. His genius was to see how the stratospherically high concept plot could serve as a foil to his character building. Here it points to the story’s artistic defect and its prenucleation status: we are simply too close to genre expectations of realism, or pulp versions of it, for the small gimmick to work. The stakes are too low. By withholding psychological interiority, Lafferty also does what he usually does to delight a reader: he gives the reader other footholds, namely linguistic quirks, oddly specific details, irony, and above all the play of ideas and thematic scaffolding, here in the theme of Order versus Entropy. But it fails because the dozens of small footholds in “Great Green Goat” are not enjoyable ones. The allotropic state we associate with a Lafferty story does not appear. Peter and Lila Lee draw our focus away from it and away from human drama, and toward the puppetry of the story’s philosophical machinery. They are somehow both secondary players in this domestic non drama. The story is Lafferty at his least oceanic.

The search for the werewolf’s tail in Chapter Six of the unpublished Loup Garou  is unlike anything else. Folksy, hilarious, weird, and drawn out to absurd lengths, it’s one of the strangest episodes in Lafferty, capped by a perfectly ridiculous payoff in a later chapter. It might be his shaggiest shaggy dog. The whole thing starts when the redneck liar Corbey, a "crafty old swindler," comes up with a bit of folklore to show off for the men gathered in Scroggins’s store. A musky excitement rises as Corbey gives a detailed, physical account (all of which is of course made up) of werewolf transformations. He says that when a man turns into a wolf, the hair comes out in waves as the man shivers, and then he tells the final, most important step, which establishes himself as the local expert. It’s the appearance of the tail: "It sounds like a cork popping when he brings it out." That detail is the linchpin of what follows, when he argues that after repeated transformations, "that tail gets where it won't go back all the ways anymore," leaving the loup garou with a permanent stub that would betray his nature. The Louisiana men of Yellow Knife, the novel’s primary setting, now believe they have a test. Every man in the community must be stripped and examined. What starts as a crazy suggestion (Sheriff Pidgeon’s attempt to laugh turns into a "tinkling giggle" as his "Adam's apple bobbled very rapidly") escalates into deadly seriousness when the storekeeper, Scroggins, draws a gun from under his cash box and enforces the rule. The most absurd moment in the chapter is a to ss-up between one involving Ribaul and another involving Mr. Boston. Here is Lafferty on Ribaul: But finally he submitted. He didn't have a tail either. He'd just been smarting off, being French. And being French also, he did a very vulgar thing when the men, and particularly Tadler, examined him at very close range. It lowers the standards of a region to have such types as Ribaul around. Before this, Boston attempts to lend the proceedings a bit of formal dignity: Boston didn't resist, or really hold back. He was too honest a man to hang back on such a community effort. But he did feel impelled to make a little speech first. "I will not be derelict in my duty, neighbors. I realize that we must all cooperate in the common cause, and perhaps my own behavior will give encouragement to another. I am an honest man and a responsible citizen. And though to one like myself, a man of the finest sensibilities, this duty is of such a nature that it is only with the greatest effort that I force myself to forgo my natural reticence at so indelicate a"-- "Ah, drop your pants, drop your pants, man" interrupted Swinert. "We've no time for eloquence." Swinert was not a man of the finest sensibilities. Boston dropped his pants, his speech unfinished, his face burning. After that, it’s pure spectacle and mob rule, with Lafferty heightening the irrationality, which he would later reverse in the short story rewrite, "Three Shadows of the Wolf." The novel describes the collapse into credulity as a “dam bursting,” pants and overalls dropping in a “sudden flood.” Men are compelled one after another to strip, from the notorious liar Ragley to the disgraced Sheriff Pidgeon and the dozens who followed in panicked solidarity, all to prove their innocence. It’s a cackling, mordant emasculation, all observed by the sly thirteen-year old Clela. The image of the tail popping out like a cork stayed with Lafferty. It's his contribution to the werewolf myth, and how could it not stick with him? It is as vivid and brilliant as his remark about the werewolf’s ankle: "The hardest part when he turns is right at the ankle bone," continued Corbey. Corbey was a crafty old swindler and he was about to pull something rich. "It hurts them there at the ankle bones. You see, a wolf is the same as a dog in the back legs. The knee (what appears to be the knee) which joints opposite to a man's, it is really the same as a man's ankle bone - not his knee bone. The wolf's real knee (what would be the knee of a man if we followed the bone to bone correspondence) is way up in the wolf's haunch. But when a man turns into a wolf the biggest change has got to be right at his ankle bone which has to expand about eight inches. You find one of those fellows who turns a lot and you'll find a man who always has sore ankles. You mark my words on that." In 1977, Lafferty wrote a poem for OKCon titled "Werewolf's Rite of Passage," which reused the folklore he had created nearly two decades before in Loup Garou . It’s a fascinating take on puberty. "Werewolf's Rite of Passage" Ten twelve-year olds, a full-mooned night, A Passage Rite led by the Masters, The change to honest folks affright, Directed by the Wolf-Shape Casters. The limbs unhinge, the head grows long, The hair turns thick and rank and grizzly, The eyes slide round, the stench grows strong, The mouth lolls open red and drizzly. The ankles stretch, the haunches slip, The frame swings downward, that's the fast part, The feet emerge in claws and rip, And, popping out, the tail's the last part. "The moment comes," the Masters shout, "Ah, change, boys, change, no time to trifle. We want to hear those tails bust out Like popping cork or banging rifle." And nine boys change in perfect blend And stand as fiendish wolves infernal. The tenth one fails right at the end: No tail. The rifle shot's internal. The tenth will never more see day. The tail jammed in a manner gruesome. To dying boy the Masters say "We're sorry son, we always lose some."

I am speaking literally about a real happening: the end of the world in which we lived till fairly recent years. The destruction or unstructuring of that world, which is still sometimes referred to as 'Western Civilization' or 'Modern Civilization’, happened suddenly, sometime in the half-century between 1912 and 1962. That world, which was ‘The World’ for a few centuries, is gone. Though it ended quite recently, the amnesia concerning its ending is general. Several historiographers have given the opinion that these amnesias are features common to all ‘ends of worlds’. Nobody now remembers our late world very clearly, and nobody will ever remember it clearly in the natural order of things. It can't be recollected, because recollection is one of the things it took with it when it went. "The Day After the World Ended" They admitted that there was such a thing as 'occult compensation' which compensated the underlings for being underlings, but it wasn't really a threat so long as it remained sufficiently 'occult.'   "An Essay Explaining the Alternate Endings of the Book ARGO" Andrew Ferguson has covered Lafferty’s unpublished "Johnny Crookedhouse," drawing the reader’s attention to the Law of Intellectual Constancy. He notes that Lafferty returned to the idea near the end of his career in More Than Melchisedech . “Though examples are found throughout his work,” Ferguson writes, “the only other direct mention of the Law of Intellectual Constancy is as the basis of the unpublished story 'Johnny Crookedhouse.'” Today, I want to consider the role and significance of the Law of Intellectual Constancy in Lafferty’s work and to suggest that Lafferty readers ought to be attuned to it. Like Ferguson, I see examples of the law—unnamed and unmistakable—throughout Lafferty’s stories and novels, both major and minor. You can see it in the well-known “Eurema’s Dam,” where Lafferty imagines the last of the dolts; and you can see it in lesser-known works, such as “I Don’t Care Who Keeps the Cows,” where the law is broken. It's a strange attractor, pulling Lafferty’s unpredictabilities into broader coherence as he runs permutations on key motifs. This includes cultural skepticism and cultural amnesia, both of which are always important to Lafferty. It's pretty easy to overlook that in three places outside of “Johnny Crookedhouse” and  More Than Melchisedech Lafferty talks about the law . It shows up in Aurelia as the model for the Law of Planetary Constancy. That isn't terribly relevant to this post, nor is its mention in Iron Tongue of Midnight . But the third mention is. Lafferty goes into detail about it in his unpublished Esquire article, “Notes from the Golden Age” (1974). Without the explanation of the Law, he wouldn't have had his strongest argument for the late 1960s and 1970s being the beginning of a new Golden Age, an idea that becomes important to the direction of his In a Green Tree. Be warned: what Lafferty does with the law is messy, what he remembers of its origins is muddled, and what he makes of it is subject to near-constant variation. I'll discuss the four explicit mentions (the ones I am aware of) in Lafferty and conclude with thoughts on how he adapted the idea. I’ll explain how it fits both his fascination with transformational leaps in humanity and his distrust of progress and utopianism—a central generative tension in his fiction. Then I’ll put together a précis of where I believe he arrived after decades of experimenting with the idea. First, the plot of the unpublished “Johnny Crookedhouse” (the version I’m working from appears in the 5.0 edition of The Man Who Talled Tales , a fan project that collects Lafferty’s short fiction). A “retired doctor,” Z. J. Steinhard (really Charley O'Malley, a Wreckville con artist) and a skeptical businessman, R. K. Random, wager $1000. The bet? Does a low-class criminal, the seemingly inept Johnny Crookedhouse, have as much latent intelligence as any man? Steinhard says that the Law of Intellectual Constancy necessitates it. To test the theory, Random hires Johnny at his factory, where Johnny's performance is a series of comical and destructive blunders, reinforcing Random's certainty of winning the bet. While appearing to be an accident-prone fool, Johnny's actions are eventually revealed to be a deliberate cover for a sophisticated heist. The story concludes with a major robbery of Random's factory. Steinhard tells Random how he has been had, and he collects. Johnny's incompetence was just a ruse for a Wreckville con called the Pygmalion Clean-out. As you likely know, the Greek myth of Pygmalion is about a sculptor who falls in love with the statue he has created, Galatea. The gods eventually bring Galatea to life. George Bernard Shaw popularized this myth with his 1913 play Pygmalion , in which a professor transforms a flower girl into a refined lady. Most Americans know the story through My Fair Lady  (1956 stage musical, 1964 film), an adaptation of Shaw’s play, which is more American in that it includes more romance and music numbers, while retaining the same themes of transformation and identity. Many writers have since offered variations on the myth. In the Pygmalion Clean-out con, Dr. Z. J. Steinhard takes on a role similar to Shaw’s Henry Higgins, while Johnny Crookedhouse parallels Eliza Doolittle. The con’s name alludes to Shaw’s central theme — the transformation or realization of hidden potential. However, this theme becomes ambiguous in the story: unlike Eliza, who begins as an unrefined cockney flower girl, Johnny was never unintelligent or unformed to begin with. What follows is unavoidably a bit heavy going. Even so, it needs to be taken into account to see how Lafferty understands and reworks the Law of Intellectual Constancy. 1.  The French intellectual Rémy de Gourmont (1858–1915) is best known in the Anglophone world as an influence on T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) and Ezra Pound (1885–1972). He introduced the Law of Intellectual Constancy in his still-untranslated Promenades Philosophiques  (1905), adapting it from a largely forgotten episode in the debate over evolution. De Gourmont closely followed the evolutionary science of his day, formulating the law from his reading of the French biologist René Quinton (1866–1925), who believed that popular Darwinism smuggled in teleology. Teleology, in this case, can be defined as implicit biological functionalism. In L’eau de mer, milieu organique  (1904), Quinton rejected both the by-then largely discredited theories of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829) (nearly everyone had by this point) and the dominant framework of Charles Darwin (1809–1882). He proposed the Loi de constance , or law of constancy, illustrating it with several empirical examples, most notably from marine life. In short, Quinton was concerned with biological laws of constancy in a scientific context. De Gourmont, who was fascinated by physiology and aesthetics, gave the principle a philosophical turn, though with a biological coloring: this is his Loi de constance intellectuelle , translated into English as "the law of intellectual constancy." It seeks to say something about human culture by arguing that the intellectual capacity of the human species has remained unchanged. From this view, people in 2000 AD were about as intelligent as those in 20,000 BC. I have found no direct evidence that Lafferty read either Quinton or de Gourmont, though it remains possible. What is certain is that Lafferty encountered the idea elsewhere and credited it solely to that other source. 2.  That source is Havelock Ellis (1859–1939), a truly unlikely name to associate with one R. A. Lafferty. But there he is. Lafferty singles him out as the only person named in his programmatic statement about his life’s work—the Ghost Story statement in More Than Melchisedech . This likely has little to do with who Ellis actually was and much more to do with the Law of Intellectual Constancy and the deep impression it left on Lafferty’s imagination. In his own time, Ellis was known to the British public as a polymath. Today, Ellis is remembered mainly as a pioneering sexologist, though he was more a proto-anthropologist of sex than a psychologist. He is a strange figure—too progressive for the late nineteenth century, too dull for the twentieth. Unlike many other British sages, he is not much fun to read. His reputation also suffered after the 1920s among the kinds of intellectuals most likely to preserve it because he resented and resisted the rise of Freudian psychoanalysis. Lafferty encountered the Law of Intellectual Constancy through one of several essays by Ellis, most likely in “The Star in the East” from The Philosophy of Conflict and Other Essays in War-Time  (1919); a review of J. B. Bury’s The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into the Origin and Growth of an Idea  (initially published in The Nation , May 22, 1920, and later collected in Views and Reviews , 1932); or “Rémy de Gourmont,” included in From Rousseau to Proust  (1928). Here are what I take to be the most probable candidate passages. From “The Star in the East”: Rémy de Gourmont was wont to insist on what he called the law of intellectual constancy in civilisation.¹ He based it on the memorable biological researches of Quinton, which have indicated that evolution—which, as Spencer left it, Gourmont declared, arose in the void and pointed to some unknown Messianic end—is an adjustment, in part effected by the formation of new, better-adapted species and in part by the action of intelligence, to maintain against the increasing hostility of a cosmos ever departing from the state in which life originated, those fixed and determined conditions of thermic, chemical, and osmotic constancy required by life. Every species possesses a constant and limited measure of force, but no more, wherewith to attain this vital and necessary end. Within the limits of the human species it seemed to Gourmont—and various distinguished thinkers and investigators have associated themselves with this conclusion—that there must be the same constancy in intellectual force, from prehistoric times until now. The achievements of today impress us more than the achievements, so far as we know them, of primitive man. We overlook the fact that the difference is accidental, the accident of position and the result of accumulated traditions. From the book review of Bury's The Idea of Progress : Although Professor Bury insists on the preoccupation of the French with the idea of progress, he makes no mention of Rémy de Gourmont's pregnant conception of "the law of intellectual constancy"—accepted as probable by so distinguished a thinker as Jules de Gaultier—according to which every species is provided with only a limited and constant power, the nature of its achievements being conditioned by the environmental level on which it happens to be placed. That view is supported by the recent tendency of anthropologists to recognize that what we regard as the modern species of man really existed at a vastly remote epoch, with just the same physical conformation and the same brain capacity as he possesses today. So also it is with the civilization, or, as Faure would call it, the style, of a people. A civilization is not indefinitely modifiable, and when it is unable to struggle with hostile conditions, it gives place to another more apt, but springing, not from itself—though some of its achievements may be handed on—but from an originally lower human level. The conditions of the present age favor the contact of civilizations, but it is not clear that the result is a new style; it may be only a chaotic confusion of styles . From Rousseau to Proust : Rémy de Gourmont is more than a critic of literature. He is a critic of ideas. He was first led to philosophy and science, he has himself indicated, by the study of words regarded as the substance of thought. But it is clear that, whatever the avenue of approach, his searching and independent spirit was bound, sooner or later, to undertake the task of examining and appraising the current notions of the time. He has devised a doctrine of the dissociation of ideas and what he calls a law of intellectual constancy as clues in the fields wherein he has approached the most various and most fundamental problems, not excluding that of sex. In science and in philosophy he is the heroic amateur, lacking in training and in equipment, but never failing in ideas. . . .   Somehow, this two-step transmission—from Rémy de Gourmont to Havelock Ellis—became entangled, in Lafferty’s thinking, with a set of his familiar hobbyhorses: suspicion of chronological snobbery, skepticism toward utopian notions of progress, his theory about the ends of worlds and the births of new ones, faith in human potential, and hope for a postlapsarian spiritual recuperation. De Gourmont, however, was forgotten, and in Lafferty’s mind the Loi de constance intellectuelle became firmly attached to Ellis. Returning now to "Johnny Crookedhouse," one crucial thing Lafferty says about the Law is tucked away in a parenthetical. Random has just heard Steinhard’s claim about Crookedhouse: he has the same human capacity to learn as any of Random’s employees. In response, Random says, “That is the stiffest nonsense I ever heard. If I hadn't developed a sort of grudging respect for your views on other subjects I would say you were a damned fool. As it is I will bet you are a damned fool in this. Do retired doctors have any money?” Dr. Steinhard replies, “If I did not have money I could not have retired. This is the proof that doctors are smarter ( within the limits of the Law of Intellectual Constancy ) and better moneymakers than businessmen. Businessmen are never either rich enough or smart enough to retire.” Lafferty’s work is filled with reflections on intelligence; the word “smart” appears hundreds of times, alongside countless variations on near-synonyms. In "Johnny Crookedhouse," Steinhard states that under the law, certain people can be smarter than others. At first glance, this seems to contradict what Lafferty writes later in More Than Melchisedech . There, he appears to take what was originally a species-level claim in de Gourmont—that intellectual capacity is fixed, in the sense that the human brain has remained roughly the same for 40,000 to 100,000 years—and apply it to individuals instead. In More Than Melchisedech , the law becomes a statement about individual potential, not just the species budget. Here is the relevant passage. I have put in bold those parts that are factually questionable, seemingly ambiguous, and potentially puzzling: There was a man named Havelock Ellis (1859-1939) an essayist, editor, physician, psychologist, and publisher of the ‘Mermaid Series of Old Dramatists’, designed to bring the 17th century dramas to a wider public. This drama revival was one of the great loves of his life: but he had very many great loves in his life. One of them was his fixed idea that there are no common people , that all of us are geniuses, that all of us are absolutely wonderful. He encapsuled this idea in a writing called ‘THE LAW OF INTELLECTUAL CONSTANCY’. The thesis of Havelock was that all persons with brains and bodies not seriously damaged are of about equal power and ability , that a guy who scratches out a slim living on two and a half acres in shantytown is as intelligent and capable in all ways   as are John D. Rockefeller, or Thomas Alva Edison, or Wilhelm Wagner, or George Bernard Shaw (G.B. Shaw and Havelock Ellis were very close personal friends), or Victor Hugo, or the President of the United States or of U.S. Steel, or of Alexander Graham Bell, or Henrik Ibsen. It was simply that peoples' fancies turned to different ways of fulfilling themselves. Ellis, in his work as physician, psychologist, and as forerunner of the psychoanalysts, was thunderstruck by the creative richness of some of the totally unimpressive lower-class people that he turned up.   And he remained thunderstruck by such things for ten years or so. People selected the enjoyments that appealed to them and followed them out in lifetimes of high pleasure. And Havelock's ‘Mermaid Series of Old Dramatists’ found echoes here. Some of the common-uncommon, lowly-but-not-really-so lowly people were recreating the wonders of the THREE PENNY OPERA or the BEGGARS OPERA in their lives.  Some of them exulted in the wonderful world and racy challenges of extreme poverty. It takes as much brains and ability for the very poor to make it as it does for the very rich. Some of the people played with Hell Fire itself and its unholy excitement. Havelock Ellis was a little bit before his time with his LAW OF INTELLECTUAL CONSTANCY.  The people who were manufacturing the current thinking of the world considered themselves very superior people, and they would not easily admit that they were barely equal to the lowest of the lowest. Yet, in less than a decade they adjusted to it. They admitted that there was such a thing as ‘occult compensation’ which compensated the underlings for being underlings, but it wasn't really a threat so long as it remained sufficiently ‘occult’.  And a little bit later, though buried under a mountain of words, it was admitted that the LAW OF INTELLECTUAL CONSTANCY was true, but not really very important on a working level. And such is still the case with it today. But it is important as a cornerstone to the explanation of the Detailed Workings of the World Itself. It is established that the human race is made up entirely of glowing geniuses. Some difficulties to consider. 1. Havelock Ellis did edit the Mermaid Series, and it is an interesting inference for Lafferty to draw. Still, it is more accurate to say that Ellis was primarily interested in making those works accessible to bourgeois readers, rather than to the underclass figures Lafferty evokes in his aside on John Gay’s eighteenth-century Beggar’s Opera . More intriguing is why Lafferty thinks Ellis held this interest for about ten years—as if he later abandoned it. I suspect this is because Ellis became more explicitly eugenicist over time, though in truth he had held eugenicist views from the beginning. What makes Ellis notable is that he was a more moderate eugenicist than his main precursor, Francis Galton, the founder of the eugenics movement and cousin to Charles Darwin. Like Galton, Ellis was deeply interested in the nature of genius. First difficulty: Ellis was a eugenicist. 2.  Ellis's interest in genius first culminated in his 1904 A Study of British Genius , published fourteen years after his first book, The Criminal  (1890). Having now read both books, I think Lafferty read them, even though Lafferty's sense of the timeline is confused. Ellis started editing the Mermaid Series in 1887. This makes the ten years Lafferty refers to most likely the period between that editorial work on the Mermaid volumes and the publication of The Criminal . Alternatively, he may have meant the fourteen years between The Criminal  and A Study of British Genius during which the Mermaid volumes were still coming out. But I'm going to apply Ockham's razor here: the timeline was imprecise in Lafferty’s mind. Remy de Gourmont did not formulate the Law of Intellectual Constancy until 1905. Havelock Ellis, for his part, did not write about it until more than two decades after publishing his first book, nearly thirty years after he began editing the Mermaid Series. Here is the second difficulty: the Ellis timeline. 3. I think Lafferty bundled all of this together with the knowledge that Ellis became increasingly vocal in his support for eugenics, something he, like G. K. Chesterton, would have rejected. Ellis was sympathetic to the Law of Intellectual Constancy on the species level, though he once wrote that it was a rather pompous name for what it described. But he was an elitist. What matters for Lafferty is that both The Criminal  and A Study of British Genius  speak directly to themes that preoccupy him. For example, in The Criminal , Ellis classifies various types of crime and notes that burglars are intelligent compared to other criminals (" criminals against the person show a much lower level of intelligence than criminals against property") . This point fits neatly with the “Pygmalion Clean-out” in "Johnny Crookedhouse": “Oh Mr. Random, we have been robbed, ransacked, taken completely.” “That so? Well it can't be very serious. My mind always notices the most important things first. They have not even been at the door to the stairway down to the vault room. Everything of worth is there.” “But they were in the vault room. They went down through the floor in your office.Come and see.” “That wouldn't be possible. There is four feet of concrete there. They couldn't have broken it out in three days.” “They did it in thirty minutes. That stuff that Johnny puton the tiles, it not only ate up the tiles; it ate up the concrete too. They shoveled it off just like mud. And then they cut through the vault top with torches in ten minutes.” To Lafferty’s interest in genius and social class, Ellis writes in A Study of British Genius  that British genius often comes from rural, non-impoverished backgrounds rather than from cities. Ellis writes, "One is tempted to ask how far the industrial progress of the nineteenth century, the growth of factories, the development of urban life, will alter the conditions affecting the production ofeminent men. It seems clear that, taking English history as a whole, the conditions of rural life have, from the present point of view, produced the best stocks." At the same time, echoing Galton’s views, Ellis claims (consistent with his eugenicist outlook) that genius tends to run in families. Among the poor, he notes, genius often manifests in exceptionally tall individuals, unlike among the more affluent, where it tends to show up in the short. And so forth. In both The Criminal  and A Study of British Genius , many passages support Lafferty’s view about the uneven distribution of gifts across social strata. The third difficulty is this selection bias. Finally, for de Gourmont and Ellis (to the degree that Ellis accepted it), the law of intellectual constancy was transhistorical and impersonal. There is no social history dimension. But Lafferty gives it a historical twist, writing, “Havelock Ellis was a little bit before his time with his LAW OF INTELLECTUAL CONSTANCY. The people who were manufacturing the current thinking of the world considered themselves very superior people, and they would not easily admit that they were barely equal to the lowest of the lowest. Yet, in less than a decade, they adjusted to it." Presumably, this is in the 1920s and 1930s. In other words, Lafferty has a theory about how the Law of Intellectual Constancy plays out in 20th-century history. To explain this, he introduces the concept of  occult compensation , a technical term from the Catholic intellectual tradition ( The Catholic Encyclopedia has an entry on it that Lafferty would have read). It refers to the extra‑legal, secret recovery of something owed to a person when the debtor refuses to pay and legal means are unavailable; essentially, taking by stealth what is rightfully yours. In a nutshell, for Lafferty’s version of the Law of Intellectual Constancy, occult compensation means this: although the law was philosophically and scientifically accurate in Ellis’s time, it was not fully active in practice. Society offered hidden channels , Lafferty's occult compensations, that allowed individuals to grow, create, and flourish. Only later did the law become overt and fully operational. Lafferty had previously thought through this in “Notes from the Golden Age”: The Law of Intellectual Constancy had just recently become true. Its verification (becoming true) is the biggest thing that has happened in anthropology. It was not true fifty years ago when Havelock Ellis and others were pushing it. It has just become true in the last half-decade, since the beginning of the golden age. And it says that every human has just about the same amount of potential. Each may carry it in buckets of a different shape, but each has about the same amount of it. I think we can now sketch the whole idea. A précis might go like this . . . Human beings have always shared roughly the same level of intelligence from person to person, barring intellectual defect, and the species as a whole has operated within a consistent intellectual budget. But in earlier times, the lower orders—the “little guy”—thrived through a kind of occult compensation. This delayed the law’s full visibility; it kept many from seeing that it applied to them. The powerful exploited that ignorance. They imagined themselves different in kind—and believed it for as long as the occult compensation remained real. The little guy had folkways, religion, crafts, and countless other means of self-realization and native genius. Then the world ended, sometime between 1912 and 1968. As a condition for what followed, an inverse relationship took hold: cultural amnesia spread, and occult compensation faded. The voice of the little guy was amplified in new ways: through mass media, the pulp press, and emerging literary forms like science fiction. That shift made the Law of Intellectual Constancy fully active and increasingly visible, a fact the powerful have had to accept, however grudgingly. Public education expanded. Nutrition improved. Democracies widened. But the change also brought flattening. Amnesia. Flatland. To make the law un-occulted, non-compensatory, and directly operational, people had to forget the older, hidden compensations. That is the world we now live in: a Flatland, the birth pangs of the next Golden Age. Much more needs to be said about what Lafferty means by genius, and why his concept diverges from the family of theories that includes Francis Galton’s notion and Spearman’s g . His argument about the Law of Intellectual Constancy serves a larger purpose: it anchors his broader vision of human genius. That would take us beyond the remit of this argument. Still, genius recurs throughout Lafferty’s fiction, as every reader quickly discovers. It is often bound to the Fall, which Lafferty repeatedly portrays as a form of amnesia. This amnesiac intelligence—forever losing the worlds it builds on its fixed budget—should be set alongside his historicization of that intellectual budget: what he called the Law of Intellectual Constancy. Lafferty wrote that there once was “a humanity both taller and deeper and more inclusive than now, of the time when animals were somehow contained in mankind” (as he puts it in "Riddle-Writers of the Isthmus"). He also saw the present human condition as marked by ghostliness—“the different persons in the PERSON” (as he describes in More Than Melchisedech ). Drawing these elements together would make a good start on a conceptual map of Lafferty’s view of what makes humanity so exceptional, stretching from trial balloons like "Johnny Crookedhouse " in the 1950s to the many thematic variations he developed through the 1980s. In the next two posts, I’ll briefly touch on how the Law of Intellectual Constancy shows up in "Eurema's Dam" and "I Don't Care Who Keeps the Cows."

Some notes on Lafferty's planets, especially for those new to Lafferty. As a kid, I loved the idea of Heinlein’s Future History, Poul Anderson’s Technic Civilization, and Niven’s Known Space. Lafferty won't give you anything like that. More often than not, his planets are hyper-concentrated ideas taken to their logical and hyperbolic extremes, a kind of planetary monomania. Each world is its central concept: Pudibundia is Politeness so absolute it becomes dangerous; Skandia is Overpopulation; Bellota is Cosmic Joke; Paleder World is Pseudo-Perfection as a Dead End; and so on. This is closer to the parade of emblems one finds in The Faerie Queene  than to the Instrumentality of Mankind. At some point, Lafferty decided to patch together a universe—one that, to my eye, first really comes together in his story " World Abounding " (1971)—building it up from what he had already written and from the synthesis of human mythology, folklore, and theology that was always his stock-in-trade. His planets are chunks of what has been called the cauldron of story. The inhabitants of Analos are the original gargoyles, and the giants on Lamos are, basically, Laestrygonians. Lafferty’s version of planetary romance is to reimagine the Garden of Eden as a con job on the un-catechized. The result is that his planets are allegorical nodes, and his universe is a moral orrery. How unsurprising, then, that the laws governing that orrery are metaphysical and psychological. Reality itself can be subjectively conditioned, as on Aeaea or Robinsonnade, or puzzlingly undecidable, as on Bellota. Wherever you are in this universe, conceptual principles will be governing you: Floating Justice, the Doomsday Equation, Phelan’s Corollary, and so on. In Lafferty’s approach to planetary science fiction, there isn't much concern for seamless canon. As in all his work, there are multiple, surging fronts of reality, overlapping, diverging, cross-pressuring, and contradicting one another. At the center of this inventiveness is a constant variable: Earth, an ambiguous anchor. It is failed first chance, the cosmic prison of evil (Pandora World, Hell Planet), the meanest of worlds and source of sickness, the backward baseline against which all others are measured, for all of them are schizo-gashes of earth. May there be more inhabited worlds than one? Whet not your knives at me, people! You thought that the question was answered forever in the affirmative, did you? And if one does not give the required affirmative answer to the Establishment, that is the end of him ? We will see. — “More Worlds Than One?” (1979) Celestial Body Classification System/Sun Key Features Gaea (Earth, World, Old Earth) Habitable Planet Sol System (Sol) Baseline for human biology, site of Skandia Visitation, target of Aratean Dispersal. Origin of colonists on Robinsonnade. Home of rare snake species Celebes Caledoniscopia. Selkirk System (The Asteroid Islands of Selkirk) Planetary System Selkirk System (Selkirk Sun) System containing forty-seven Earth-type planets in a narrow belt. Way-station where colonists are filtered for superstitious beliefs before being sent to Further Worlds. Planets named after secular liberal figures (Nietzsche, Darwin, Truman, Yellow Dog). Robinsonnade (The Forty-seventh Island) Habitable Planet / Asteroid Selkirk System (Selkirk Sun) One of the forty-seven island planets. Colonized 20 Earth-years ago by four families to create a colony free of superstition. Deemed "tainted" and quarantined. Prone to strange manifestations (mirages, bi-location, alien snakes, Shadow-Man). Puca Home World Habitable Planet Unknown Unnamed strange planet from which the Puca originate. Geography consists of inextricably mixed land and water, with endless caves. Puni Planet Habitable Planet Unknown Rich but undeveloped world inhabited by the Puni, a technologically primitive (stone/glass age) but highly intelligent and treacherous species. Master mimics capable of perfectly impersonating humans. Hippodamia Asteroid-Station Unknown Undistinguished asteroid-station. Features a dangerous "compensating dome"—an intelligent, inescapable trap causing victims to die of exertion or heart failure. Inhabited by hog-fat creature named Porcellus. Thieving Bear Planet Habitable Planet Unknown Post-spinning, ecologically serene planet with strange effect forcing visitors to record falsehoods in their logs. Inhabited by Thieving Bears ( Ursus furfificus ), giant pack rats that feed on physical and mental substance of visitors. Haunted by ghosts during "electric nights." Kentauron Mikron Habitable Planet Proxima System (Orion Sun) Sindbad's home world. Known as "Melody World," famous for its "wisey air" and exporting potent anti-depressant drugs. Camiroi Habitable Planet Alpha System (Sun Alpha) Most advanced of the four "human worlds," with a hyper-advanced, rigorous education system and extremely fluid legal and political structure. Astrobe Habitable Planet Proxima System (Orion Sun) Mankind's "third chance." An opulent, golden urban world with vast cities and blighted slums. Astrobe apples are part of traditional explorer's meal. Dahae (Paleder World) Habitable Planet Proxima System (Orion Sun) Also known as Paleder World. Adult inhabitants are "post-conscious," living in passionless perfection. Creates psychic imbalance where their children become "monstrous," telepathic beings manifesting deadly illusions. Skandia Habitable Planet Alpha System (Sun Alpha) Homeworld of the Skandian, a species obsessed with extreme overpopulation and fertility. Pulibundia Habitable Planet Alpha System (Sun Alpha) Homeworld of the Puli, metamorphic shapeshifters whose direct gaze is lethal. Analos Habitable Planet Alpha System (Sun Alpha) Homeworld of the Analoi, a gargoyle-like species that feigns post-human perfection but secretly maintains savage rituals, including cannibalism. Proseritus Habitable Asteroid Alpha System (Sun Alpha) Homeworld of the biologically immortal Proseritae, who shrink over millennia into living dolls. Paravata Habitable Planet Alpha System (Sun Alpha) High-gravity world where the larval Oqvata can only become the elite Itogha through a ritual hunt, one of the 76 deficient worlds. Shelni Planet Habitable Planet Alpha System (Sun Alpha) Homeworld of the Shelni, a gentle, goblin-like species harvested for canned food; described as a world for harmony and beauty. Emporion Habitable Planet Beta System (Sun Beta) An "inelegant" Trader Planet characterized as having no law. Apateon Habitable Planet Beta System (Sun Beta) An inelegant Trader Planet characterized as having no ethics. Home world of the genetic engineer Griggles Swing. Klepsis Habitable Planet Beta System (Sun Beta) Inelegant Trader Planet governed by Covenanted Piracy, with a freshwater ocean. Famously has "no history" and is the location of the "tertiary focus" of the Doomsday Equation. Aphthnonia Habitable Planet Beta System (Sun Beta) The Hasty Planet with hyper-accelerated life cycles and "terminal cultures." Known for impudent artists. Bellota Habitable Planet Beta System (Sun Beta) A midget world created as a joke by its sole major inhabitant, the telepathic and temperamental creator-being known as Snuffles. Has anomalous phyla. a burlesque ecology. Aranea Planet-sized Asteroid Creycon Belt (Sun Beta) Homeworld of dodecaped spiders who force visitors into a metamorphosis via cocooning. Various Minor Worlds Various Various Includes: Tarshish, Shining World, Wallenda World, Rouletteunwelt, Krastron-Kosmos, Caroll's Planet, Lotophage, Lemos, Strenesca, Polyphemis, Arsena, Yellow Dog, Hellpepper Planet, Sad Dog Planet, Calden Trelast, Nine Worlds, Apateon, Womboggle World, Fleuvre World, Ghar, New Dakota, Nine Sky Gelfporte, Peluria, Di Carissimus, Mars, Jupiter, Callisto, Orpheus, Bandicoot, Priestly Planet, Areostor, New Shanghai, Hokey Planet, Far Tortugas, Pirate-Emirate Asteroids, Hound Dog Hulk, Beggars' Choice, Delphinia, Dobson's World, Geloiopeia, Horner's Corner, Kolokythokephale, New Shem, Ragdale, 5BOK394, Merowter, McStonella, Leucite, Debter's Hole, Barbary, Suzuki-Mi, Stoker's teals, Wrack World, Ganymede. Cosmological Principles Principle Description The Particular Universe (The 17-World Construct) The humanly inhabited universe is an unstable, closed system described as a kinetic three-dimensional ellipse containing four suns (Sol, Proxima, Alpha, Beta) and seventeen habitable worlds. The Doomsday Equation threatens its existence. The Selkirk System (The 47 Asteroid Islands) A system of forty-seven Earth-type planets orbiting the Selkirk Sun. Functions as a quarantine and filtering zone for colonists, weeding out those with superstitious beliefs before they can proceed to Further Worlds. Planets like Robinsonnade that fail this purge are left marooned. Universal Immortality The discovery of a cure for mortality which was found to be a simple disease. This event ushered in the "after-life" and prompted the creation of bureaus to construct eternal Heavens and Hells. Floating Justice The ethical equivalent of geological isostasis. A principle of cosmic rebalancing where every inequity is eventually corrected. Its final tenet states that "the meanest man of all the worlds will possess the ultimate treasure of the worlds." Post-Consciousness & Psychic Imbalance A state achieved by a hyper-advanced race (Paleder/Dahae) that has evolved beyond consciousness. This creates a "kick-back" where all the cast-off psychic energy is inherited by their children, who then manifest this as deadly psychic storms and hyper-realistic illusions. The Cycle of Dying Worlds A theory that worlds have a finite span and die periodically. Rebirth is not guaranteed and requires a 'transcendent yeast'—a simple chemical psychic catalyst . . . to be added to the mass of the dead world. Multiple Realities & Skylarking The universe contains multiple superimposed realities. The perceived world is dependent on the reality one accepts. 'Skylarking' is a form of subjective/psychic travel used to explore these realities and other worlds. Dark Companions & Planetary Constancy The theory that every world has a 'Dark Companion' or anti-world. This is related to the Law of Planetary Constancy, which states that all worlds are approximately equal in potential. Phelan's Corollary / Law of Levity A heretical doctrine about field forces. It posits a 'law of levity' that can supersede gravity, explaining the anomalous gravity on small bodies like Kentron-Kosmos and Bellota.