The objective truth as such is by no means adequate to determine that whoever utters it is sane; on the contrary, it may even betray the fact that he is mad, although what he says may be entirely true, and especially objectively true. I shall here permit myself to tell a story, which without any sort of adaptation on my part comes direct from an asylum. — Søren Kierkegaard , Concluding Unscientific Postscript   (1846) Like a handful of other Lafferty stories, "Milly" is not included in the most recent The Man Who Told Tales . That is a shame. It is a very fun story. Over ten years ago, Andrew Ferguson wrote about it and pointed out the alliterative names. He also noted that Virginia Kidd once remarked on this habit in Lafferty’s work. After that, Lafferty seems to have toned it down. I am thankful for Kidd’s comment. It probably pushed Lafferty to become even more creative with the names he gave his characters. As we all know, his character naming best tools we have for understanding his work. So what is "Milly"? It is a murder mystery, but that does not quite capture what it is. It is more accurate to say that it uses the murder mystery format to explore themes of perception, causality, and the friction between logical systems and human experience. In this way, it is very much a Lafferty story, and it has excellent dialogue. It's a satire of the "whodunit." It all begins with a strange greeting card verse about a "happy appendectomy." From there, Lafferty puts a deeply detached anthropologist at the center of the crime, armed with essentials like Guelf’s Cephalic Tables  and Sweet’s Slang Dictionary . This anthropologist is not interested in murder, but in the kind of young woman who writes greeting cards and thinks like his ancient and capricious Aunt Agatha Asquith. From this starting point, the typical, lurid, and trashy parts of a normal mystery story get short-circuited because "Milly" is a mystery story that refuses to get in line. Take an uninspired interrogation scene from an average piece of Alfred Hitchcock Presents  or Ellery Queen . The detective asks smart questions. The suspect gives slippery answers. Clues fall into place. In "Milly," it does not work that way. The following interrogation shows what kind of game Lafferty is playing. “Did you kill the girl?” “Of course I didn’t. I never kill people.” “Do you know who did?” “I believe so. Since she could hardly have done it herself, I believe it must have been a third person.” “Would it be asking too much if you know the name of the third person?” “No. I have no way of knowing that.” “She was dead when you arrived?” “Yes. Recently but conclusively so.” “Then why didn’t you do something about it?” “I am a scientist — in my opinion, a very clever one. But resurrecting the dead doesn’t come within my field. When it is infrequently done, it is more likely to be done by a religious or a mystic than by a scientist of any sort. I didn’t do anything about it because there was nothing I could do about it.” The story’s driving force is the man being questioned, the anthropologist Dugglesby Dunham, whose déformation professionnelle blinds him to normal social and ethical standards. When he finds Milly’s body, he shows no horror and no sense of civic responsibility. He follows only the methods of his research. He treats her body as a set of data, using calipers to measure her head and recording a "cephalic index of seventy-eight." He notes with clinical frustration that "there is something very contrary about a dead girl when you try to stand her up and measure her." His detachment reaches a high point during the police interrogation and starts to weaken slightly afterwards. His opponent is not just any officer, but a crude lieutenant named Eric Spoormand (the real killer), who eats peanuts while questioning him. Dugglesby justifies his behavior (research) with an analogy: "How often will a policeman phone an anthropologist when he sees an interesting type in the course of his day's work? You would be surprised how seldom." Dugglesby is one of Lafferty’s caricatures of the person who sees the world only as a collection of facts.. The binding normative force that guides most people does not move Dugglesby Dunham. Pretty early on, it becomes clear that the story will focus on flawed perception, with a group of characters who have names like Clandestine Carney and Shoo-Shoo Schoengeist. A typical mystery moves forward by uncovering facts. This story moves forward by building up mistakes. The “handle” needed to solve the case is eventually pieced together from three conflicting descriptions of Dugglesby: to Clandestine, he is a "sweet little red-headed man"; to Shoo-Shoo, a "crude little greaser"; and to the greeting card printer, an "old Phoenician," he is a "big buff man, sort of a cowboy type." Even Dugglesby, the trained observer, joins in this confusion. He misreads the girls’ screams of terror as a cultural ritual and writes in his report that women of their "vagrant type" "greet each other with loud screaming." In this early and light story, there is already a trace of Lafferty’s interest in consensus reality, where what people accept as real is often made up of shared misunderstandings. Solutions come from both secrets and anti-secrets, from seeing the mixed-up and hidden patterns inside these collective mistakes. When thinking about this story, I realized that something at work in much of Lafferty’s writing is what we might call the principle of disproportionate causality, where huge and deadly results come from small and unimportant causes. He enjoys this kind of setup, and it shows up here. The motive for the murder comes down to the greeting card verses written by the victim. Milly turns out to be not only a murder victim but also someone who might have been pregnant. One of the verses she sends him is: I’m sure we’ll be happy, And don’t say it’s not done, ’Cause I’ve got a pappy, And he’s got a shotgun. Spoormand, who wanted to marry someone with money, found the greeting card verses unbearably irritating (“there ought to be a law against writing verses like that with a needle in them”). One of the better moments in the story comes after the girls send Dugglesby a fan letter in verse (“We never met a murderer before”) and ask for tickets to his execution. In the final lines, Clandestine reveals that the “Happy Appendectomy” verse—which had so fascinated Dugglesby and led him to research Milly—was actually hers, not Milly’s. She ends by saying, “You come with me, Dugs, you have your girls mixed . . . Milly couldn’t write an iamb to save her life.” By now, it should be clear that “Milly” uses a reversed mystery structure to mock misplaced logic in a world where illogical things happen because people themselves are illogical—something anthropologist Dugglesby Dunham seems to have overlooked in his studies. When he is found innocent, it is not because his reasoning succeeds, but because he gets caught up in the irrational social systems around him. A mix of mistaken perceptions and Dug’s new dislike of peanuts ends up solving the crime. Mostly unread, yellowed, and boxed up in Tulsa, “Milly” is another Lafferty story that deserves to be printed.

A short post today on the unpublished “Condition Quick: A Dia-log Between Two Dia-Persons.” It's a squib, what we now call flash fiction. It is one of the many pieces where Lafferty vents his frustration with the cultural and literary shifts of the 1970s and 1980s, but here the satire is compressed into two pages. We find Lafferty's ongoing exasperation with America's distorted media ecology and his sense of how rotten the state of science fiction is. The punning title is our lived reality: condition quickly, ye lords of TikTok. The piece also satirizes the informational overload Alvin Toffler made famous in Future Shock  (1970); the acceleration of media analyzed by Marshall McLuhan; the cultural nightmare of content explosions that are deserts of quality; and the ways media systems stupefy through the violence of speed and volume. SS and VW are dia-persons. They have a task. They need to document the creative torrent flowing from their network, "CONDITION QUICK." This media system gives them "instant reception of all the millions of SFish thoughts" from the world's most “creative” minds. VW describes the overwhelming nature of this influx by comparing it to trying to capture the entire ocean, quoting a hypothetical observer who says, “‘I’ve got to get it all down right now . . . The way it’s carrying on, it sure isn’t going to last very long.’” VW notes both of the dia-persons are tuned into "roughly nine million creative minds" and have witnessed "five genuine Golden Ages in the last fifteen minutes," leaving him to wonder, "How would we go about getting it down?" SS has an idea. They ought to begin with one of the many "magic, evocative, mind-opening words," words like "Al-Ka-Zam, Ma-Ga-Zine, Mummy-Whammy, Zauberei-Stoff, Galli-Mauferie, Razz-Ma-Tazz." VW latches onto "Mega-Zine," but SS corrects him, clarifying the word is "Maga-Zine, the place where you store explosives." One needs an advertising gimmick. "All CONDITION QUICK data are explosive so let’s get them down in a magazine." To capture the content (it’s all content, content, content in “Condition Quick”), SS argues that speed is the only thing that matters: "I say that the answer to the explosive CONDITION QUICK depends on how fast we write it down," SS insists. This focus on media speed and consumption leads to a harebrained brainstorming session on how media mediates, with Lafferty mocking the mania for novelty. SS says they could "write [CONTENT] on almost anything, on elephants, or on alligators (not everyone has an elephant), or on the sides of cross-country balloons." Then there is the sky itself. VW says they "could write it on sticks of dynamite since we'll probably have them in the magazine already," adding they "use a cold-etcher rather than a hot-etcher." He also proposes writing on "the insides of duck eggs or petrel eggs or snake eggs," prompting SS to worry about their potential audience, which he dubs "a funny readership: For-the-Birds, For-the-Snakes, and a Little-Bit-Immature?" In other words, the “science fiction person” who has all four hooves in the trough of heroic tedium . Then VW has an idea. "Hey, maybe we could write it down on paper." SS recognizes it as a radical and archaic choice. "Paper? As in ‘He couldn't punch his way out of a paper sack'?" he asks. "Well, I've heard that the lower classes still use paper for some things. It would be different anyhow." Now they can feel special and different. VW knows just what to call their magazine: CONDITION QUICK, The Dare-To-Be-Different Magazine For Explosive People . This is good sour fun, a late addition to Lafferty’s 1970s reflections on media. It must have been cathartic. He even shivs John Maynard Keynes. SS says that Keynes’s answer to an addition problem is how fast you add it up, an allusion to Keynes's focus on aggregate demand and government-managed spending rather than the old quantity-theory fixation on totals, such as money supply and velocity. No surprise here. One would expect Lafferty to view Keynesianism as leading to long-term inflation and government bloat, and the inefficiency and debt that follow.

New section added to the blog for the oceanic novels. Some diagrams for how I think they work. The diagrams isolate what I take to be their three big questions: What is this seemingly flawed world I’m in? Who am I in this world? What will remake me and what will I pay for it? Laurence M. Janifer intuited that Lafferty’s oceanic novels are about the third question, and he wrestled with how they relate to genre in "He Saw Another Mountain " (1974). He called the piece a rave for the next book Lafferty would write. Janifer wrote that the highest request made of fiction (any art at its peak, he said) is this: “Create me.” Janifer nailed it, but he didn’t recognize that Lafferty had already decided not to give the kind of answer that would have satisfied someone like Janifer. This is ironic because he also wrote in the piece, “He has what every man has, a theology, but—a requirement for any artist above a certain fairly high level—he knows what his theology is.” The imperative “Create me” as Janifer conceptualizes it is an aestheticist ideology. That is an idiotic false hope for autotelic completion displaced onto things—one of the heresies of the Modernism Lafferty reviled—and something to be rejected at all costs on Lafferty’s view. Perfection, he said, was just another word for completion. It would not happen in the temporal order, but it was necessarily sacramental and participatory. So, his oceanic novels answer the third question with another: “Through the grace of God, you will have to create yourself with the Laughing Christ. But here is a vision, so you will know you are not alone. What will you do now?”

On my reading, Prime in the Oceanic Novels will always be perceptually complicated, so I spent some time in the last few days thinking about how I see the deep structure and playing around with modeling it. These diagrams should speak for themselves. First, I will outline the model that I see as active in the Oceanic Novels, and then provide a worked example using Fourth Mansions .

Notes on The Coscuin Chronicles . Like everything in the Resources section, it is a work in progress, but it may also be useful to others. It distills the series’s central dialectic: a metaphysical struggle between the Green Revolution, a vital and chaotic force rooted in earth and tradition, and the Red Revolution, an ideological, sterile, and nihilistic current. 306 pages.

“I'd like to have a people-kid sometime,” Teresa said. “After all, mama had me. A people kid have fun playing with the fish kids, and they like him, too. And he could climb int he rocks with the Groll's Trolls. He would sort of knit our family together. You think about it, Peter, and I think about it too, and we see what we come up with at the next milting time.” Lafferty’s "The Ultimate Creature" is a yarn, a cosmic fable about Peter Feeney, “the meanest man of all the worlds—a low-down sniveler, a weak man,” who has something unusual in his fate. According to the universal law of Floating Justice, which is rigidly isostatic, the lowly Peter will receive the ultimate treasure. The story defines this law as the principle that “every unbalance will be brought into new balance” and contains a final tenet: “that some day, somewhere, the meanest man of all the worlds will possess the ultimate treasure of the worlds.” On a remote planet, Peter meets and marries Teresa. She is part human, but she says that her mother was “a queer fish, mama.” Their marriage brings them perfect happiness. It restores the balance of Floating Justice, as “the meanest and weakest man in the universe now possessed the Ultimate Treasure of the universe.” But there is a wrinkle, and Lafferty lays it on thick with a weird mix of the bittersweet and the grotesque. The children of Peter and Teresa are not human but thousands of Fish Kids and Groll’s Trolls. In their perfect domestic life, it is a normal, loving thing to catch and fry their own offspring for dinner. Lafferty gives the reader this tender exchange: “'Oh, four such pretty kids of ours!’ Teresa said. 'Fry them, Peter.'" After the science fiction market opened to him, Lafferty would sometimes turn the draft of a story written for a different market into one written for the science fiction crowd. This happened with “The Ultimate Creature,” which originated from the unpublished short story "Teresa." The MS version of "Teresa" that I have is incomplete, with its last page or a few pages missing. The original is off-kilter. “I’m not good,” Lafferty once told Harry Harrison, “at writing things to a pattern.” You know it won’t be a typical romance. Still, it is conventionally patterned (minus the fork business which made it into “The Ultimate Creature”) and grounded. It’s a funny poignant romance about Peter Feeney, an unassuming and unsuccessful salesman who possesses a secret, extraordinary talent. As Lafferty writes, Peter is “a man of deprivation and penury . . . a museum prowler unable to own, a viewer, always a viewer- never an owner.” This becomes a defining aspect of the other, later Peter Feeney of “The Ultimate Creature,” who has “the finest eye for beauty in a woman of any man anywhere.” "Teresa"'s Peter travels to Portuguese Ambeno, a remote outpost, the place you get to when “you go to the end of the world, and turn left,” where he meets Teresa, she of supreme beauty. Lafferty delights in imagining the perfect woman, and it's fascinating how he reshaped the original in the rewrite—my favorite change being the impatient Irishwoman with her brood of children from “Teresa”—“a mother of six in Cork: not really young, of no repose or station or ease; hurried- hurried always, impatient”—transformed into a woman on an alien world: “the mother of six on Camiroi… hurried impatient, and quite likely the most beautiful woman who ever lived.” I'll probably always suspect the Camiroi as being a little Irish. As you’d expect, in both versions Teresa instantly becomes for Peter the standard against which all other women are measured. From the rewrite: “Then Peter saw Teresa. And she made the seventh? No. She made the first. The six faded. There was only one.” In the original, a string of encounters builds a quirky bond with a native. It reminded me of Lafferty being more at home among Catholic Tagalog speakers and Mexicans than among the WASPs he served with in the army; he said they seemed alien. It also recalls the nostaglic encounter with the native girls in his novel Archipelago . In the rewrite, the same beats appear but with altered shading: a shared meal, a cigar clumsily dropped and deftly reassembled by Teresa, and a moment of public humiliation—now rendered with a science-fiction gloss. What was lightly erotic in the original—Teresa “folded and rolled them by ancient formula into a green cylinder that was sheer art. She licked it with the most beautiful tongue in the world”—becomes comically fantastical in the rewrite: "Teresa rescued it, reassembled it, and licked it. Her tongue had a tripart curve in it, more extensible, more flexible, more beautiful than other tongues." The MS version of "Teresa" breaks off with marriage and departure by boat, as Peter and Teresa leave for “a happier place, a larger island in a more amenable location, where Teresa might regain her lost beauty.” I wish I knew the twist ending of the original. There probably was one. ---

The Smiling Christ of St Francis Xavier Gregorio Montejo's essay, "There Are Three Ways to Open a Secret Door: R. A. Lafferty's Bricolage Aesthetic," is, in my view, the most incisive piece of Lafferty criticism yet published. I think it’s brilliant, but I break with it. It begins with Claude Lévi-Strauss's account of bricolage  and ends with the Thomistic analogia entis , an arc that moves from structural anthropology to theological ontology. Because Montejo positions those two ideas as mutually illuminating, the strength of his argument hinges on whether bricolage  and the analogia entis  can cross-ramify. If they cannot, the claim that Lafferty is a Thomistically minded writer who works in a Lévi-Straussian mode would need to be re-examined, for it would suggest a disjunction between Lafferty's aesthetic signature and a central aspect of his Catholic imagination. Montejo first lays out Lévi-Strauss's theory: meaning emerges through the imaginative recombination of pre-existing fragments, which are signs, materials, stories, and other cultural leftovers For Lévi-Strauss, the bricoleur  is not just a stylist or outsider artist, but a thinker who, constrained by contingency, discovers latent structures by arranging what is at hand. Montejo's analyses of "Continued on Next Rock," Lafferty's "secret door," and the Duffey-and-time motif ask how recombination and juxtaposition work in Lafferty's fiction and demonstrate that a Lévi-Straussian perspective can be fruitful and interesting. The essay's difficulty lies in setting what I consider an aesthetic effect beside the analogia entis . In Thomistic metaphysics, the analogia entis  names the way every creature shares, by analogy, in God's act of esse : likeness is genuine, yet always outstripped by a greater unlikeness. From Aquinas to Przywara and Von Balthasar, theologians have stressed the participatory realism and the asymptotic transcendence embedded in the doctrine. If Lafferty's sacramental poiesis  is essential to his art, we should ask whether a reader's experience of his bricolage  depends on (or can be detached from) Lévi-Strauss's account. Nothing requires that Lafferty be fully consonant with the bricoleur of La Pensée sauvage  (1962); his recombinations could orient consciously toward a sacramental horizon that Lévi-Strauss, as a structural anthropologist, undermines. Here, a parallel suggests itself: both bricolage  and the analogia entis  involve the play of the many within the one, yet they operate in different registers. Bricolage  remains an aesthetic-cognitive procedure conditioned by historical contingencies; the analogia entis  is a metaphysical principle describing the participation of finite beings in God. Therefore, any "Catholic" bricolage  differs from Lévi-Strauss's structuralist model not by abandoning contingency but by allowing the play of fragments to hint at an order beyond themselves. The rest of this post will attempt to sketch out what that means. Consider “Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne.” The narrative juxtaposes several alternate histories without merging them into one causal continuum. As a physical artifact (ink on paper or pixels on a screen), the story certainly has an act of existence, though only accidental, not substantial. However, the  symbolic field  created by the montage does not constitute a new substance endowed with its intrinsic esse ; instead, it is an intentional unity offered to the reader's mind. That intentional unity can powerfully evoke a higher coherence: the intellect glimpses analogically how disparate histories might be held together. In Thomistic terms, this is participatio intentionalis  (formal, in the knowing subject) rather than participatio essendi  (ontological, in the thing's very being). The montage is evocative, suggestive, even doxological, yet it does not itself become another participant in the one act of esse . So, bricolage  and the analogia entis  correspond in a strictly formal and asymmetrical way: the first furnishes an aesthetic shorthand for unity-in-difference, the second names unity-in-difference as a metaphysical fact. Art can illuminate the shape of order and invite the reader into contemplative participation; it cannot add a new being. Whether Montejo means to claim more than this—that is, that Lévi-Strauss's bricolage  already is compatible with the stronger mode of participation—is the big question for weighing his synthesis. In its fully structuralist sense, the bricolage  model carries assumptions that sit uneasily with the analogia entis . The structuralist is not merely describing a method of artistic composition; he is claiming the ground of meaning itself. For this reason, Lévi-Strauss's thinking would make the analogia entis  itself a myth since in structuralist anthropology, coherence arises through juxtaposition within an immanent network of signs that mediates between contrasts found in the conceptual structures of culture, all ordained by the deep structure of binary oppositions. I will return to the danger of making the analogia entis a myth later. The bricoleur  has it especially hard in one sense: the bricoleur  works inside a closed semiotic system, making do with fragments already caught in the loop of culturally inherited signs. Lévi-Strauss puts it this way: "the engineer always seeks to open a way through and situate himself beyond the constraints that make up a given state of civilization, while the  bricoleur , willingly or by necessity, remains on this side of those constraints. This is another way of saying that the former operates using concepts and the latter by means of signs." Thomistic thought is very different. Its signs begin not with this kind of concepts and signs circulating in an immanent structure but with the givenness of esse  itself. Every finite thing participates in, and is exceeded by, the infinite act of being who is God. Meaning is first discursively received, because creation is already intelligible by participation; only then is it interpreted and articulated by human makers, whose very activity depends continuously on the conserving act of subsisting Being. The disjunction is therefore metaphysical and methodological: if structuralism is absolutised as a self-sufficient theory of meaning, as it is in Lévi-Strauss, it delimits intelligibility to the play of immanent signification. The material stuff outside semiotics is, in one sense, meaning's mute environment. It thus eclipses the prior intelligibility grounded in actus essendi . If I am right, there are a few options. If a drastically weakened view of bricolage is subordinated to that ontological horizon, it might serve as an Imaginative witness to participation rather than rival it. This raises a question. Does Montejo's reading keep bricolage  within an asymmetrical, participatory frame, or does it slip into a closed semantic space sealed off from the analogia entis ? I am unsure, but I suspect it gets pretty close. Why? If you grant bricolage  the kind of explanatory authority Lévi-Strauss does, the relationality of analogia entis  collapses into decorative metaphor. That sounds harsh, but I'm not sure how else to put it. Meaning becomes a function of arrangement, not participation, leaving the reader in an immanent word game where nothing outruns the system. Lévi-Strauss knew this. Jacques Derrida saw the problem in 1966 when he wrote, in perhaps the best known intellectual assassination of the last century, that should anyone accept Lévi-Strauss's model on its terms, his picture of the engineer, the master of concepts, is already the bricoleur's  invention, the master of signs. By the same logic, analogia entis becomes what I have already said: one more mythic construct, a fiction produced by bricolage . Take this one step further, and you will see why the cosmic engineer would be Himself a semiotic illusion. This did not bother Lévi-Strauss. In his sour  Tristes Tropiques , he wrote that intellectual honesty is incompatible with any ultimate rationale for myths, even though humans find sensory satisfaction in living as if  such a rationale existed. That is how it looks from the viewpoint of bricolage . Now look at it through analogia entis . If participation in divine Being is ontologically prior, because every creature depends continuously on the conserving act of subsisting Being, then even the bricoleur's  semiotic play is in transcendental meaning. The bricoleur doesn't need Lévi-Strauss's mid-20th-century theory. The ends of Montejo's arc set conceptual limits on each other: bricolage  cashes out meaning on the level of contingency and reusability of cultural forms. At the same time, the analogia entis  insists that those forms remain signs of a prior intelligibility. More importantly, bricolage  degrades analogy into cultural detritus reassembled for local effect; the analogia entis , by contrast, places bricolage within an economy of ontological gift, where fragments signify not wholly arbitrarily but sacramentally, eliminating the need for a totalizing, immanent semiotic  explanans. For Thomists, the analogia entis  allows humans to speak truthfully about God. It affirms a real but proportionate similarity between divine and created being. It connects Creator and creature while grounding knowledge in reality. Central to this is human  intellectus , which is not de-centered discursive reasoning as it might be Lévi-Strauss (a catty French gibe against him being that he created Kantianism without the transcendental subject), but a receptive insight that grasps being as both one and many. Meaning is recognized. The world speaks because it participates in being, which points back to its source. Human understanding does not construct significance; it encounters it. We are far from Lévi-Strauss, who said, "the ultimate goal of the human sciences is not to constitute, but to dissolve man." And that is the problem with the structuralist account of bricolage . As Lévi-Strauss tells us, it is "imprisoned in the events and experiences which it never tires of ordering and re-ordering in its search for meaning." It operates within a centerless system. Everything must be explained without appeal to a beyond. The beyond is banned. Why? Because when meaning is produced through binary oppositions, nothing outside the code can fix the reference. Interpretation detaches from reality, or rather, the real becomes a reality effect. Ontology is subordinated to semiotics. Faced with this impasse, four broad options present themselves. (1) One may affirm the analogia entis  and treat the fragments as sacramental signs participating in divine Being, Lafferty's implicit stance. (2) One may adopt structural immanence: reject the analogia entis  and read symbols as intratextual myths generated by a stable binary code, which is Lévi-Strauss's position. (3) One may embrace a non-Thomistic realist reference, choosing any alternative metaphysics: Peircean semiosis, Scotist univocity, process realism, semantic externalism, and the like, just ANYTHING that grants extra-systemic reference without appealing to Thomistic analogy. (4) Finally, one may opt for radical immanentism, denying that the fragments reach outward at all and treating every appearance of transcendence as projection within a self-contained aesthetic or post-structural free play where even structural codes dissolve. These four stances are mutually exclusive in principle: each grants or withholds transcendence and the stability of reference in a distinct way. Choosing among them is not a mere aesthetic preference; it decides whether the bricolage  of culture points beyond itself or folds back into an endless rearrangement of signs. Lafferty's method resembles bricolage , but only up to a point. It departs from Lévi-Strauss's account, which aimed to explain the mythmaking function. Lafferty's practice needs a different qualifier—something closer to spolia : the reuse of sacred architectural or sculptural elements from earlier structures in later ones. In both antiquity and the Middle Ages, spolia  preserved meaning across time. Artists and craftsmen embedded these fragments in new wholes, but their origins were not erased. Lafferty does something similar. Let's call it bricospolia . Spolia in the city wall of İznik, Turkey, at Lefke Gate Bricospolia would designate the reuse of fragments drawn from Divine Revelation and natural reason, not merely as inert historical residue, but as ontically resonant components extracted from Heilsgeschichte, or salvation history. One might encounter in the cobbled face of such a structure a composite vision: the Virgin Mary as Eva, or inverted, as Ginny Wrapped in the Sun, ambiguous icons gazing backward and forward at once. Unlike structuralist bricolage , which operates within a self-contained semiotic matrix, bricospolia re-embeds these ontic fragments within a new whole whose coherence arises from the analogia entis as it has worked its way through time. These fragments of destroyed worlds do not lose their referential weight in the shuffle of signs. Each retains its ontological force, pointing beyond itself and resisting the nihilism latent in semiotic relativism. Together, they mark not mere difference but participation—an opening into being. The result is a sacramental whole, ordered toward transcendence. To the secular humanist eye, what might appear as a collage assembled in the cramped apartment of an outsider like Henry Darger is, in truth, something produced by a flawed artist who cared about sanctification. With this in view, we can clarify something Montejo essentially gets right but does not fully develop: his claim that Lafferty creates topoi  that, through "ornamentation," become "Holy Lands." It's a compelling insight. Still, the term ornamentation  may be too superficial for what the essay sees—consecration. We might follow Lafferty himself and retrieve the concept of adornment  as it appears in the Summa Theologica  (I, q. 44), where Aquinas describes the world's beauty as a necessary effect of its ordered participation in the divine. On this view, the transformation is not decorative but ontological: an ascent from ornamentation to adornment. Bricospolia  can account for that ascent. It salvages fragments whose form already embodies an analogical, quasi-sacramental reference, a potency that, on Thomistic grounds, inheres in the fragment's form (capable of becoming an intelligible species in the reader's intellect) and thus survives displacement, and re-situates them within a new narrative ordered by the analogia entis . In doing so, it invites the reader's intellect to conform to, and thereby truly participate in, that reference. The practice converts decorative detail into ontological declaration. What begins as ornament is transfigured into adornment. An analogical radiance can emerge from a ktistic  machine working out its ordo amoris , as in Arrive at Easterwine . From disordered being, splendor formae , the radiance of form, flickers out into privatio boni , leaving behind only a tenuous vestigium entis , as in Not to Mention Camels . Recall the small bit of screaming flesh that ends the book: "It couldn't, of course, be an actual soul screaming forever in hell. It had to be some imitation." Radiance can also be held in suspension, narratively deferred and expectant, as in Past Master  and The Elliptical Grave . The "secret door" of bricolage opens onto other configurations within the system of signs; the "secret door" implied by analogia entis opens onto Divine Being. A concept like bricospolia  resolves the central ambiguity in Montejo's argument, which turns on the meaning of the adverb as  in his phrase " Bricolage  as Analogia Entis ." That "as" carries a lot of weight. Does it mean, "Think of bricolage  the way you think of the analogia entis"? Or does it mean, " Bricolage  is itself a case of the analogia entis "? As Montejo's argument stands, I don't know whether either works. On the deepest level, this is because the analogia entis  in Lafferty's fiction culminates in the Incarnation, what Von Balthasar called the "concrete analogia entis ." One cannot bricolage the Incarnation. Christ is a symptomatic absence in Montejo's fascinating essay. The ornaments in Lafferty ultimately reveal a structure and adorn a Person, Lafferty's Laughing Christ. All those potential mutations scattered through his novels and short stories? As I have banged on about, they are laughing meditations on fallenness, regeneration, new creation, divination, theosis, and more. Goof gloriously, Freddy : the pun is intentional. It plays on the possibilities of glorification. I find this imaginative atmosphere in Lafferty's work: a divine comedy in which laughter, mystery, and terror converge in Christ, not through irony, but through something stranger. In Orthodoxy , Chesterton ends with the puzzle of the Person of God in Christ hiding His mirth: "The tremendous figure which fills the Gospels towers in this respect, as in every other, above all the thinkers who ever thought themselves tall. His pathos was natural, almost casual. The Stoics, ancient and modern, were proud of concealing their tears. He never concealed His tears; He showed them plainly on His open face at any daily sight, such as the far sight of His native city. Yet He concealed something. Solemn supermen and imperial diplomatists are proud of restraining their anger. He never restrained His anger. He flung furniture down the front steps of the Temple, and asked men how they expected to escape the damnation of Hell. Yet He restrained something. I say it with reverence; there was in that shattering personality a thread that must be called shyness. There was something that He hid from all men when He went up a mountain to pray. There was something that He covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation. There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth." A similar idea appears in Chesterton's poetry, in the fiery image of a "raging mirth" at the center of the world: Never we know but in sleet and in snow, The place where the great fires are, That the midst of the earth is a raging mirth And the heart of the earth a star. And at night we win to the ancient inn Where the child in the frost is furled, We follow the feet where all souls meet At the inn at the end of the world. The gods lie dead where the leaves lie red, For the flame of the sun is flown, The gods lie cold where the leaves lie gold, And a Child comes forth alone. How do we make sense of the raging mirth within the bricolage and at the center of Lafferty's world creation? Is it more than a parallel, more than what Lévi-Strauss calls the metier of the  bricoleur , " a collection of residues of human works"? What hinges support the secret door? These questions converge in a moment from The Flame Is Green , where Lafferty says something important about Christ, art, and doors: “it would be a long weird way coming,” she said to the peasant painting of Christ Coming Through The Walls. “We will still look for it. We will come through walls ourselves. There aren’t any doors to where we have to go.” Spolia at the Theater of Pompey, near Campo dei' Fiori Dimension Structuralist bricolage  (problem space) Bricospolia  — how it resolves the tension Thomistic & Laffertian pay-off Ontological grounding Meaning is generated within a closed play of signs; nothing fixes reference outside the semiotic circuit. Re-uses sacramental sign- spolia  that already signify analogical participation in esse.  images and motifs conserving truths of revelation or natural reason; their inherited forms pattern the montage, while the story’s own esse is still received immediately from the First Cause. Restores the analogia entis  as the primordial horizon; cultural artistry is re-ordered to the actus essendi  rather than vice-versa. Transcendence vs. closure The  bricoleur  is “imprisoned in events,” mapping binary oppositions inside an immanent system; transcendence is methodologically banned. Each fragment retains a vertical orientation toward the source of being; technique can be a sacramental window rather than a sealed kaleidoscope. Opens the “secret door” from mere aesthetic response to contemplative ascent; imagination becomes an organ of participatory realism. Status of the fragment Merely a recyclable residue,material whose previous context is cancelled for the sake of new function. A reverent salvaging: the fragment’s earlier meaning is preserved and deepens its expressive potency inside the new composition. Echoes medieval spolia : the Church builds its basilica from pagan columns without neutralising their history—an image of grace perfecting nature. Unity-in-difference “engine” Structural coherence arises from formal juxtaposition alone; unity is heuristic, not real. Coherence arises from a deeper ontological kinship disclosed by analogy; technique gestures to an already-given order it can hint at. Distinguishes participatio intentionalis  (in the reader) from participatio essendi  (in the fragment) and lets the first serve the second. Authority of meaning Arrangement is sovereign; interpretation never escapes relativism. Analogia entis  risks reduction to a myth among myths. The fragments’ sacramental surplus (grounded in prior esse ) resists total domestication; reference outruns arrangement and finally terminates in Deo . Safeguards doctrinal realism: Christ, the “concrete analogia entis ,” isnot fabricated, by the artwork. Aesthetic register Produces clever ornamentation—surface play that dazzles yet remains decorative. Elevates ornament to adornment ( splendor formae ): beauty becomes an ontological declaration of order and finality. Fulfils Aquinas’s dictum that the world’s beauty is a necessary effect of its participation in divine Being. Reader’s epistemic experience Invites the intellect into an endless “word-game”; no stable resting place for assent. Invites intellectus  to glimpse analogical radiance, confirming that what is intuited symbolically is really so in act. Moves from aesthetic wonder to theological wisdom; the story becomes a guided exercise in lectio mundi . Christological horizon Absent or at best metaphorical; the Incarnation can only be another mythologeme. Bricospolia orients every fragment toward the Laughing Christ who gathers histories into Himself. Grounds Lafferty’s “raging mirth” in the Paschal mystery: comedy, terror, and glory converge in the Incarnate Logos, not in semiotic free-play. Metacritical consequence Accepting Lévi-Strauss on his terms dissolves both author and reader into the code. By subordinating bricolage to ontology, bricospolia safeguards the integrity of the human subject (creator and reader alike) as a participant in truth. Keeps Montejo’s arc intact: Lévi-Strauss illuminates craft only insofar as his model is “baptised” and exceeded by Thomistic analogy. Analytic dimension How bricolage / the bricoleur work Key theoretical implications Contrasted figure: the engineer / modern scientist Core definition & etymology Bricolage  (from bricoler , “to bounce/veer off course”) is the practice of fashioning new constructions out of the “odds-and-ends” left by earlier ones; the bricoleur  is the agent who does so. Names an intellectual and technical attitude rather than a technological stage. Engineer begins with a project that determines tools; the bricoleur begins with tools/materials that condition every project. Universe of available means Works with a closed, finite, heterogeneous stock (“whatever is at hand”) accumulated from past breakdowns & successes; each element is “half-specialised” and “pre-constrained” by its prior history. The set is instrumental , not goal-determined; every new task starts with an inventory/re-inventory of this treasury. Engineer’s universe is in principle open; he can design or order novel tools and raw materials to suit the plan. Semiotic regime Operates with signs, not concepts: images/materials already loaded with meaning that can still be permuted; they “address somebody.” Shows that mythic thought generalises through  sensible forms; signifier and signified continually exchange places. Engineer operates with concepts seeking transparency to reality; signs are tolerated only as interim labels. Method (logic in action) First move is retrospective: dialogue with the stock, asking what each fragment “could mean” and how it might be re-functioned. Selection of one piece forces a total re-organisation of the emerging structure. Logical model is the kaleidoscope: lawful generation of unlimited patterns out of finite shards. Engineer’s method is prospective: start from a blueprint and coerce matter into it; resistance is a technical, not semiotic, interlocutor. Relation of structure ↔ event Builds structures out of the residues of events (“odds and ends”); structure is after  event (diachrony → synchrony). Mythic thought is the same: bricolage on the plane of speculation. Science produces events out of structures (experiments, hypotheses); the inverse relation. Creativity & “objective chance” Because every choice is constrained, final products are always slightly out of phase with initial intention; chance combinations become eloquent (Surrealists’ hasard objectif ). Bricolage , therefore, speaks with things and by means of things; the work embodies the maker’s biography. Engineer strives to eliminate contingency; success is measured by the reduction of surprise. Epistemic status Constitutes a “science of the concrete”: rigorously classificatory, qualitative, and older than modern science, yet no less rational. Explains why myths, rituals, folk taxonomies, outsider art, collages, etc. display internal logical necessity despite material heterogeneity. Modern science is a “second science” grounded in abstraction and quantification; both modes are valid, complementary paths to knowledge. Ontological position Stays within the historical constraints of a civilisation; works “on this side” of limits. Guarantees cultural memory: every bricolage is a palimpsest  preserving traces of earlier worlds. Engineer tries to break through constraints, to locate himself beyond the given state of culture. Typical outputs Patchwork myths, scale-models, folk rituals, naïve architectures (e.g., Facteur Cheval’s palace) — all rearrangements of inherited fragments that project new meaning. Outcomes are structurally coherent yet metaphorical; they reveal alternative intelligibilities latent in the debris. Scientific outputs are metonymic: machines, formulae, technical artefacts that directly intervene on reality.   Dimension Bricoleur ’s sign  regime Engineer’s concept  regime Theoretical stakes / consequences Ontological texture The sign is a concrete object-image that already carries meaning; it “accepts, and even requires, that a certain human density be incorporated into reality.” The concept is a pure intelligible form that seeks to be “integrally transparent to reality,” stripping away cultural thickness. Bricolage keeps knowledge embedded in culture, whereas engineering strives for an ideally culture-free representation of nature. Scope of reference A sign can substitute for others, but its capacity is limited and “pre-constrained” by prior uses. A concept possesses an unlimited capacity to refer, combine, and generate new predicates. Explains why myths re-work a finite stock of motifs, while science can theorise an indefinite field of phenomena. Position on the nature ↔ culture axis Works inside a subset of culture (the residues of human works); signs, therefore, mediate between natural qualities and social memory. Seeks to situate itself beyond the given state of civilisation, aiming to interrogate “nature in the pure state” with concepts. The two modes mark different strategic levels at which reality lets itself be grasped. Operational logic Signification = re-organisation: the sign reshuffles an already-given set; it “neither enlarges nor renews the set” but generates new patterns among its parts. Concept = opening-up: the concept is an operator that extends the set, forcing new properties or tools into existence. Bricolage is transformational, engineering is expansive; both are rational but orient knowledge differently. Dialogic relation Receives “pre-transmitted messages,” codes condensed from past practice (commercial codes, myths). Anticipates the as-yet unspoken message that must be forced from an unwilling interlocutor (nature). Foregrounds a contrast between the interpretive reading of residues and the experimental questioning of phenomena. Temporal orientation First move is retrospective: inventories the stock and asks what each fragment might “mean.” Method is prospective: starts from a blueprint and designs means to match it. Gives bricolage a memory-work character; gives engineering a projective one. Combinatory freedom Signs are permutable but finite: alteration of one element reconfigures the whole limited system. Concepts enter theoretically unlimited relations; they form open, infinitely extensible systems. Explains why mythic systems resemble a kaleidoscope (many patterns, bounded shards) while scientific theory resembles set theory (infinite constructs). Mode of address (Peirce) A sign inherently “addresses somebody,” calling for interpretation and dialogue. A concept seeks impersonal adequation; the interpreter’s presence is ideally irrelevant. Shows that the bricoleur’s reasoning is relational and rhetorical, the engineer’s formal and detached. Epistemic form Constitutes a “science of the concrete” that reasons through sensible signs and analogies. Embodies a science of abstraction grounded in measurement and formal deduction. Dissolves the old “primitive/modern” binary: they are complementary logics, not evolutionary stages.

Today, something interesting, although it falls into a niche within a niche within a niche. In other posts, I have written about how Lafferty uses E. I. Watkin’s 1932 work The Bow in the Clouds: An Essay Towards the Integration of Experience  to create Barnaby Sheen stories. What I tried to do is go deeper than just observing that Lafferty color-coded stories by theme because the more interesting thought is how and why he did this . If you haven't read any of that, Watkin’s book is Catholic metaphysics for a gene ral audience. More specifically, it is St . Bonav enture for the masses, conveyed through an expensive metaphor: creation is akin to the electromagnetic spectrum. Watkins integrates the range of human experience, from the scientific to the mystical, by assigning each mode a symbolic place along the rainbow. At one end, the invisible band of ultra-violet represents brute matter, the foundational substratum of reality. The visible spectrum follows in order: violet stands for the positive sciences, blue for metaphysics, green for life, yellow for art, orange for sex, and red for religion. The book concludes with an invisible band of ultra-red, which Watkin links to the transcendent experience of mysticism, the higher reality beyond concept and image. Although Lafferty used Watkin as source material for the Sheen stories, he also drew on it, at least once, in thinking about his work beyond them. As so often in his writing, an idea does not stay cautiously contained within the thematizing plots of The Men Who Knew Everything . It becomes a means to understand what he was doing as a writer. On a page otherwise filled with scribbles for Sheen stories, he noted that Archipelago , his personal favorite of the novels, was “a fantasy at 3700 angstroms,” and boxes the idea to set it off from the others, which are about Sheen material. Within Watkin’s system, that wavelength (3700 Å, or 370 nm) is an important threshold: physically, it is where the invisible near-ultraviolet ends and the visible violet begins; conceptually, for Watkin, it is the boundary of unknowable reality and the dawn of human perception and knowledge. On the ultra-violet side of the spectrum, Watkin places Matter, not perceptible objects, but the fundamental substratum of reality. In this philosophical sense, analogous to the quantum fields of modern physics or the materia prima  of scholasticism, Matter is pure potentiality, knowable only through its effects. By definition, it is "imperceptible to the eye, but of potent influence," a reality whose final secrets elude scientific probing. On the violet side appears the first visible color, which Watkin associates with the positive sciences. It is where substratum takes perceptible form and gives rise to humanity’s abstract knowledge. 3700 Å: where the hidden foundation of physical being becomes just barely accessible to inquiry When I came across the scribble about Archipelago being “a fantasy at 3700 angstroms,” I thought: now that is some Lafferty. It reads like a code that only he would think to use. In the Sheen stories, Watkin is quoted directly, a tipoff to his presence. Here, though, Watkin is used differently: as a telescope to look across the rest of the Lafferty canon. Lafferty sets one part of the ghost story against another, embedding within the Sheen material a code by which other elements might be deciphered. Ahoy! From way over on the Sheen side, a signal is spotted— Archipelago , flickering at 3700 angstroms. And it makes sense. Archipelago  is itself a fantasy about the perceived and the unperceived, about what is separate, coextensive, and liminal.   Examples? From page one, a character can be “in the Garden” one moment and then find that “The Garden was gone, and he was in the middle of the World.” It’s a perceptual transition across a boundary as figuratively thin as that between visible and ultraviolet light. The Dirty Five are all in dual states. They are both soldiers in the Pacific during WWII and archetypes. Henry is “Friar Tuck, or Pantagruel,” Hans is “Apollo, or Dr. Faustus,” and Finnegan is “Dionysus, or Ulysses” (39), and so on. The “invisible” mythic identity coexists with the “visible” human identity. And what applies to character, of course, applies to place and time. "At the same time,” Lafferty writes, “that some of this was happening, Finnegan was spending twelve years in happy marriage to Theresa Piccone. But there is no room for those twelve years in this framework" (201). The 3700-angstrom note was just an offhand jotting from Lafferty, but I think it’s fun—a glimpse into how his mind worked as it worked, and a reminder that once something was admitted into the Ghost Story, no part of it was ever sealed off from the rest.

Some advanced Lafferty. I find Not to Mention Camels a hard book. Its components are easy enough to understand, but understanding what Lafferty is doing and how it fits together is challenging. One way to model the main conflict is to map it as being directly about good versus evil. Another is to step back and see it as a clash between fundamentally different and incompatible power systems, each vying for dominance within the derivative media bubbles of non-Prime realities. These power systems exemplify the good and evil in their strategies. What makes the book especially demanding is that Lafferty presents a metaphysical vision of the world from the derivative point of view. All in Not To Mention Camels is secondary, contingent—derivative—of what is itself derivative and contingent: the created world. Within this derivative-of-a-derivative, the Creator of Prime is dramatically offstage. As far as I can recall, this formula is unlike anything else in Lafferty. Lafferty situates his novel not in a faux version of Prime—the real world created by God—but in its proliferating third-order derivatives, the worlds spun off from that consensus creation. Prime itself is derivative in one metaphysical sense, for it is God’s creation, not God Himself. The derivative worlds of Not to Mention Camels  are derivatives of that first-order creation’s creation. They are third-order counterfeits. What never appears, and cannot appear, within these counterfeits is the Creator in derivative form, for that would reduce the uncreated source of all things to the status of a created counterfeit—a contradiction in terms, and thus a logical impossibility. I think the novel is built to exploit and explore this imbalance, making it one of Lafferty’s “what if Gnosticism were true?” experiments. This time, though, Lafferty separates the Gnostic cosmos from our cosmos of Prime radically. What do I mean? ‘’Snuffles” (1960) can be read as a kind of Gnostic pocket dimension of Prime in which an unlucky planetfall transpires. In theory, mediation could happen. Not To Mention Camels is not like that. With this in mind, I want to sketch one way into the novel’s design: by tracing how it inverts the usual relation between antagonistic and protagonistic forces. In another Lafferty story, a figure like the Polder schizo-gash would almost certainly be cast as the structural antagonist, yet in Not to Mention Camels  he is our protagonist—one reason the book feels so disorienting. Arrayed with him are all the powers of evil, what I’ll call the “Left Hand of God” faction, set against the opposing force, the “Even Hand of God” Gid (Noah, Consul Evenhand, the muddled kid, and others). The result is that Good and it’s God plays the role of antagonist. The justice revealed at the book’s end is treated as if it were happening to a narratological protagonist—known by turns as Pilgrim, Polder, and so forth—and so it registers as both metaphysical horror and black comedy. That horror fits, for it is precisely what it means to embrace the condition of a damned soul in hell: a Divine Comedy felt from the wrong side of judgment, as it were. Before going further, I want to pause to address a complicating factor in this already very complicated novel. At several points the narrative turns meta-metaphysical, but we need to set aside those large set pieces—the Narrow Corner and the Nine Worlds—to focus entirely on the primary in-text environment we observe (since Prime itself remains violently off stage). These are proximate derivatives of Prime. Let's call them metastable derivative world arenas. Arenas are branch-worlds or crossroad-worlds: realities defined precisely by their lack of hard consequence, the spaces the anti-God protagonist enters through his repeated death-jumps. Their arena physics are unstable; as Doctor Funk says, “nothing ever winds all the way down without winding something else up.” These are Gnostic playgrounds, and they let Lafferty dramatize one of his recurring master-ideas: belief shapes will reality with few checks. That contrasts with the protagonist’s real antagonist—the ordered, Creator-governed world of Prime, which is always about the big checks: Heaven and Hell. Pilgrim Dusmano knows that Prime is the one locus where “logic would prevail . . . It is one-dimensional and one-directional. It would be murderous to such a man as myself . . . They keep accounts on Prime World; ultimate accounts, I mean. They keep crabbed, careful, fetishistic accounts.” The Arena worlds, by contrast, are bubbles of suspended disbelief. The goal of The Left Hand faction inside such a metaphysical bubble world is to control its consensus reality without making it pop, or to avoid blipping out through death, which is a kind of non-final pop, a losing of the metastable arena game. The Camels protagonist keeps losing—after all, he keeps having to jump—and the worlds get worse each time, in theory rearview mirror and out beyond the windshield. So what is the main resource for both the Left Hand faction and the Even Hand faction? Let’s call it “Latent Collective Belief,” anti-amnesia serum, Lafferty’s “oceanic”: the raw, undirected psychic energy of the masses, the collective unconscious, the sediment of archetypes, which can be manipulated through media distortion. One aspect of it is the mob’s craving for spectacle and meaning, the same public the Media Lords exploit when they “pour the enlivening action into the people; they pour it into all the senses and all the intuitions. They become the churning blood of the bloodless people; they are the deviled brains and the spastic spleens and the goatish gonads.” If the bubbles are also media systems, then this is both the prize and the medium of the arena conflict. If you look at the right-most, dominant path of the diagram, you see it models the protagonist system. He is a "High-Gain Belief Transducer," converting the low-grade energy of collective belief into high-impact, manifest power. Cheap and spectacle oriented. He is a ruse, a techno-Machiavellian, a high priest of cultic gnosis. His instrument has a twofold operation. First, its "Hollow Core" with "Zero Internal Resistance" is its most critical feature. By the end of the Camels , we find out that the protagonist is (or has become) an eidolon, an artificial man; Hector Bogus sees him clearly as a “miniature effigy, a badly made one,” and the doctors at his final death find him to be a composite of “eidolon fiber, human flesh, regressive or camel flesh all mixed together.” Thislack of a "real" soul self with moral or logical convictions has been driving the character into perdition. The formula goes something like hollowness = privation = evil. Evil licenses how The Left Hand faction channels the desires of the collective without minimized moral friction. The protagonist is a conductor. Second, the conducted immoral energy is processed by the "Charismatic Amplifier," which is cultic/media-oriented performance. This is the protagonist public persona: “the man with the shimmer, with the dazzle about him . . . the hypnotic man, the electric man, the magnetic man, the transcendent man.” Through rhetoric, manufactured miracles, and ritualized violence, he imposes a coherent signal compelling to his followers. The output is "Manifest Power"—the force so strong it can create cults, topple governments, and move mountains. This is the power that the protagonist wants to use to "Seize Control" of the Arena's narrative. The left-hand (intentionally flipped) subordinate path models the side of “Good,” Noah, the Consul, the murdered child. In these secondary arenas, the antagonist is a "Low-Gain Legitimacy Engine," trying to process the same input of collective belief. Its core is "Solid" with "High Internal Resistance." This is the antagonist’s integrity, goodness, fixedness . It is “real being," "certified so" as a man of "innocence or goodness or spotlessness," as Lafferty writes. Privation/evil is not driving the antagonist, so he cannot serve as a vessel for the mob's chaotic desires; his own reality gets in the way. His "Formal Authority" shell, derived from law and morality, is the correct and legitimate source of power in an ordered world, an ideal Prime. But within the arena of a derivative world, which runs on spectacle, his source of power gets no purchase. It’s a signal that cannot be processed by the system. The public has no use for ordinary goodness when offered a “devil-revel,” which is why in the derivative media-world arenas the peak experience is “to destroy a high person if he is good . . . ‘It is more pleasure to kill one good man than a hundred indifferent men.’ . . . This is folk-knitting to form red history.” So what is the outcome of this contest? The entire setup diagoses an Eidolon Engine, and the engine’s victories are always pyrrhic. While the Eidolon can successfully seize "Narrative Control of the Arena," the external "Prime Principle"—the absolute reality of logic and consequence—exerts constant ontological pressure on the entire third-order system. An Eidolon Engine's power is based on escalating artifice; to prove dominance and maintain the belief of his followers, the protagonist must gin up ever-greater spectacles, a process which culminates in the novel's parodic mountain-moving. The hecklers goad him with the ultimate challenge, the “one proof you cannot fake”: “Mountain-moving!” Ultimately, the protagonist creates the one spectacle—a witness to the absolute, undeniable power of the antagonist—that the artificial environment cannot support: “The mountain rose and moved in its full weight and mass. There was earthquake, there was airquake, there was skyquake.” But this triumph causes the Arena's narrative to pop, leading directly to the dissolution of the protagonistic force: “The mountain-moving incident had marked Polder Dossman’s highest height. From then on, he went down rapidly. And at once . . . Mountain-moving will always set up an equal force in the opposite direction, and the effect of that equal force was to dissolve the Dossman cult.” Again, this is only one part of the larger picture. I’ve written elsewhere about how the protagonist undergoes a passage from flesh to Eidolon. With Lafferty there is always so much going on.

You may already have guessed that I once joined their company. But I was a very recent recruit of theirs and I have broken away. To make up for the part I have had in it I will try to stop the thing. Now, here is what you will do— “This is the way the world ends,” said Larker at the table across. “The lights go on and it's revealed that it was all a play-act. There wasn't any world. There was only the fiction of a world.” Let’s play with an idea. One of the great puzzles in Fourth Mansions  is the identity and nature of Leo Joe Larker. I wouldn’t abandon the search for clues, but he seems to belong to a recurring type that Lafferty creates in his novels, a cousin of the mysterious man who addresses Thomas More in Past Master ; of Mr. X in the Devil is Dead  trilogy; and—perhaps in his donor function—of Fulbert Fronsac in The Reefs of Earth . Fourth Mansions  fans know that Lafferty, fluent in German, drew on Carl Jung’s Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self  ( Aion: Untersuchungen zur Symbolgeschichte , 1951; Princeton University Press, 1969). From Jung came the idea of the quaternity of the four factions. Did Lafferty also absorb some of Jung’s Alchemical Studies  ( Studien über alchemistische Vorstellungen , 1967; Princeton University Press, 1968), the work where Jung developed the mercurius archetype? Mercurius is the alchemical yeast, the trickster—mischievous, high-spirited, and often tutelary—and Leo Joe matches this to a T. But Mercurius is also duplex (see the head image) and appears as the senex , the Saturnine old man, rigid and leaden. Jung calls this version of him Mercurius senex  and stresses that the two belong together: puer and senex are the poles of its nature, the volatile and the heavy, the playful and the constraining (CW 13, Alchemical Studies , p. 226). I would argue that Carmody Overlark in Fourth Mansions reflects the mercurius senex aspect, standing in counterpoint to Leo Joe’s mercurius puer . . Whoever or whatever Leo Joe Larker is, his surname is no accident. It ties him to Overlark. Carmody Overlark must thwart Leo Joe Larker just as the senex snuffs out change to preserve order. At the same time, the mercurius puer forces transformation on the mercurius senex . Interestingly, Freddy Foley—as Holy Fool, and perhaps mercurial instrument and mediator—perceives Leo Joe as a puer . In Jungian terms, Leo Joe is Freddy’s individuation of the mercurius puer archetype: But Leo Joe Larker, who was the oldest of the Larkers and four years older than Freddy, said that they were Gypsies. He said that they could tell who was going to be murder and who was going to die that year. He said, moreover, that they could work magic, and that he himself had raised a man from the dead. And Freddy also knows something important, namely that the mercurius puer is timeless, always puer aeternus : “You haven't changed, Leo Joe, except in your voice. I used to know you when we were boys.I can't see you in that dark doorway, though.” Nothing was changed in Leo Joe except his voice. Here are the relevant passages about Leo Joe from Fourth Mansions: Passage 1: Childhood Memories (Chapter III) Among these was the Larker family. The Larkers could have been any of the three, or could have been something else . . . But Leo Joe Larker, who was the oldest of the Larkers and four years older than Freddy, said that they were Gypsies. He said that they could tell who was going to be murdered and who was going to die that year. He said, moreover, that they could work magic, and that he himself had raised a man from the dead. But Freddy's father had said that the Larkers were a blacknecked bunch of Irish tinkers, the last of them, and that the world would be better when they were gone. Passage 2: The First Encounter in the Doorway (Chapter III) But what gave Fred Foley the creeps was that he knew what man was standing there, and he couldn't have. Ah well, a fellow who raised a man from the dead when he was no more than nine years old will always have a certain presence about him. "Hello, Leo Joe,” Freddy said boldly. “Is it yourself I am to meet?” It was Leo Joe Larker standing there still unseen, either as blood-curdling boy or as man. "You know my name? I underestimated you. I'll have to find out how you know my name, since it wasn't told to you,” said the black gap behind the cigarette." "You haven't changed, Leo Joe, except in your voice. I used to know you when we were boys. I can't see you in that dark doorway, though.” Nothing was changed in Leo Joe except his voice. But the voice was all that could be encountered of him. If the boy's voice could not be recognized in the man, and if the man himself was invisible in the dark, then what was it that identified him? Passage 3: The Warning (Chapter III) “But if my meeting isn't with you, how do you have any part of it?” “Never mind my part. Upstairs you're going to be threatened by a couple of rough-talking gentlemen . . . They can kill you, and there's a fair likelihood that they will.” “Well, what do you want me to do?” “I want you to stay on it, Foley. Be dumb, blind, blundering, and silly, but stay on it. You may be dumb enough to get to the core of it.”“Well, will you help me with it, Leo Joe? I'm totally in the dark.” “No, I won't help you . . . I'm just telling you not  to lay off. If they can kill you, Foley, I can kill you worse. If they can scare you, I can outdo them at that too. Now go up to your appointment. You better not be late.” “What will I do?”“Whatever they tell you to do, don't. Whatever they tell you not to do, do it. But say what you have to, to get out of there alive. And don't keep any more appointments in dark rooms with people you don't know.” "I don't know anything about old kids. I'm probably not who you think I am.” The man came out of the doorway still wrapped in dark, passed by Freddy Foley silently and disappeared. He didn't look much like Leo Joe Larker should have grown up to look like; he hadn't sounded like him at all. The dark glimpse had shown a man who might be a Negro. The voice, remembered now, had something of that tone. Nevertheless, Fred Foley believed that this interloper man had been Leo Joe Larker when he was a boy. Passage 4: Carnival Memories (Chapter III) But what really happened, Leo Joe Larker had told him (Leo Joe the boy who seemed to have grown into an altogether different man), was that the man sawed her in two all right and she died. Then they got a different lady to show the people out in front. They used up about five ladies a day with the act. Freddy had always believed Leo Joe's explanation . . . Passage 5: Recollection in "The Bug" (Chapter XI) And one other detail made Fred Foley doubt his sanity a little. Leo Joe Larker might be there in the Bug. And he repeated an earlier warning: “Whatever they tell you to do, Foley, don't do it. Whatever they tell you not to do, do it. Be dumb, blind, blundering, and silly, but stay on it. You may be dumb enough to get to the core of it. Passage 6: Encounter in "The Bug" (Chapter XI) "You're on your own with it all the way. I'm just telling you not to lay off. If they can kill you, Foley, I can kill you worse. If they can scare you, I can scare you double. Now, go to your appointments. Oh, I forgot! You've already been to your appointments. You're in here with us now. A lot of good it did you to be dumb and blind and silly. You didn't come any closer to whipping the thing than us smart ones did.” “Are you all right, Leo Joe?” Foley asked him. There was a puzzle about this Leo Joe Larker. He was a Negro now. There was no doubt about that. But he hadn't been one as a boy. Mexican, Gypsy, Indian maybe, or dirty-necked Irishman, but Negro, no. He didn't grow up to look anything like himself as a boy, his voice was not anything like that. He was, however, the same man who had spoken to Freddy from the darkened doorway one night. Yes, and he was Leo Joe Larker who had raised a man from the dead when he was a little boy. You're sure of some things, even after you're crazy.“Why do you call me by that name?” Leo Joe asked. “That isn't the name I'm committed under.” [. . .] “I know it. But that Leo Joe stuff wasn't the name I had been going by either. I'm not even sure that I remember it. Are you sure that's my name? I'm probably not who you think I am." Passage 7: The Ice Cream Man at the Fence (Chapter XII) The ice cream man, selling ice cream bars to the inmates through the iron fence, was Leo Joe Larker. But wasn't Leo Joe Larker still an inmate of the Bug? No he wasn't. He had escaped that very morning . . . They didn't capture him because they didn't recognize him. He did not look anything like what he had looked like inside the Bug. He was a different man entirely in appearance; he had been several such different men; only Freddy Foley could recognize him. [. . .] "You, Leo Joe, or I?” Foley asked him."You, Foley, you're the fool . . . " "Little Leo Joe, the man who changes faces and never gets a very good one. What are you doing with an ice cream pokey?” Passage 8: The Sherbet Bar and the Final Warning (Chapter XII) (But this Leo Joe wasn't a clown. He had told Foley. “If they can kill you, I can kill you worse. Whatever they tell you to do, don't do it. Whatever they tell you not to do, do it.” This was Leo Joe Larker who had perhaps raised a man from the dead when he was only a boy.)“I'm not Leo Joe. I'm no one you ever saw before. The ice cream pokey gives me certain vantage points.” [. . . ] “Here's a grape sherbet bar for you, Foley,” said Leo Joe. “Digest it well.” Passage 9: The Note (from Chapter XII) (That was the sticky scribbling of Leo Joe Larker on the lavender-stained paper.)I know that you haven't any plan, and I haven't much of one. I have a few men. I need a few more. At sundown you will take three good men and go over the fence. (But will you be ready for it? asked the note from Leo Joe Larker that Freddy had taken from his sticky pocket. Ready or not, you will have to come. I am prepared to visit some plagues of my own; but only on the returnees, not on the world. You may already have guessed that I once joined their company. But I was a very recent recruit of theirs and I have broken away. To make up for the part I have had in it I will try to stop the thing. Now, here is what you will do—) (Meanwhile, back in our main context, Foley-Smith had finished reading the note from Leo Joe Larker. There were some straight specifics in it. That Larker was a real strategist, a poor man's general. He knew how to go about a street fight, a town fight. And the last words of the note: Now eat it. Chew it up and eat it. It should have a pleasant sherbet flavor . . . Now swallow it. Foley was to take three of the inmates over the fence with him. Larker had written that more would be useless.)(Meanwhile, Foley briefed them again rapidly, armed them from the cache that Leo Joe Larker had hidden and told of in the note . . . what Larker had called the Night of the Long Knives in his notes. Like all unstarred generals, Larker was something of a ham.) Passage 10: The Final Encounter at Proviant's They sat across from Larker (or a man who was just possibly Larker; he had still another appearance now), who was with some people Foley didn't know. Foley and Larker exchanged glances and maintained the fiction of not knowing each other. “This is the way the world ends,” said Larker at the table across. “The lights go on and it's revealed that it was all a play-act. There wasn't any world. There was only the fiction of a world.”

Today I found myself thinking again about Hilaire Belloc, which brought to mind Lafferty’s satirical “Rogue Raft.” The piece lampoons the self-assured certainties of science, specifically how public boosters can go too far, missing the larger questions. While the theme isn’t unique in Lafferty, his thought-experiment and essayistic approach is. Everyone takes a turn in the crosshairs, including Lafferty himself, who colors his persona as tender-hearted, dreamily scientific, and a touch naive.   The big pretense of the essay is to be deeply, seriously concerned with Ice Ages and sea levels. It lays out out what everyone now knows: Ice Ages lower the seas because water locked in massive ice caps is drawn from the oceans. In reverse, if today’s ice caps melted, most of the world’s ports would vanish underwater. This theory accounts for the land bridges that once linked continents—between Asia and America, or across the North Atlantic—allowing people, animals, and plants to migrate during glacial periods.   Lafferty then recalls that Belloc once questioned this and lost a debate with H. G. Wells. Marcellin Boule , whom Belloc cited and whom Wells mocked him for citing, had actually argued even more strongly that Ice Ages were times of high  seas. Both Boule’s and Belloc’s views were dismissed as illogical. This is what Lafferty attacks. His tone is dry, his strategic disingenuity masterful: “And it was on this point that Wells whipped him, completely and to be remembered forever, with his magnificent display of scorn. And so the day was saved for ‘science’. Belloc had been leading on points up till then; a good sportscaster would have carded him about seven rounds out of nine.” Note that the victory is chalked up to scorn, not to logic. To demonstrate the established theory’s logic, Lafferty does a thought experiment. He gives an analogy of continents as rafts floating on Earth’s magma, then invites us to imagine a real raft. When water is pumped into a tank on the raft, the surrounding water level (the pond water around the raft) drops, causing the heavily-loaded raft to ride higher. This leads to one of two wonderful images in the essay: the reductio ad absurdum  of a raft that has so much water poured into the tank that it ends up floating in the air over the lowered water level of the pond. The essay’s other beautiful image is the nearly Edenic Sangamon land bridge. Lafferty imagines (compassionately but performatively and with irony) how much easier it would be to explain anomalies in geology, archaeology, and anthropology if sea level worked the other way. He pictures a world of grassy, sub-tropical land bridges and frostless migrations, where species could spread "leisurely and pleasantly."   But this is impossible, Lafferty says. The orthodox theory must stand, no matter how many inconvenient questions it raises or how unpleasant its vision of history is. We are stuck with cold human migrations.   So how does this satire work? We need to go back to the debate itself. Belloc argued that Wells had presented a complex and unsettled issue as a simple, settled scientific fact. He outlined that there were two forces at play: melting ice caps would add water to the oceans, but at the same time, landmasses relieved of that weight would rise. Belloc asked, “Which of the two factors predominated?” and concluded that since “the matter is still debated,” Wells’s confident claim was an example of “bad science.” Belloc’s main objection was not to the conclusion itself (he was really going after natural selection), but to the scientific certainty with which Wells was committed. “Mr. Wells,” he wrote, “is evidently a man confusing theory with fact.”   Instead of addressing the substance of Belloc's point, that two factors conflicted, Wells mocked him. With the ridicule was acidic condescension. He dismissed Belloc as an uninformed amateur who had been duped, suggesting that "some facetious person seems to have written to Mr. Belloc" or that he was the victim of a "leg-pulling friend." Lafferty suggests that Belloc might have been in on the joke. I find this exceedingly unlikely, but Lafferty’s deeper point is Belloc had humor and Wells was humorless. For understanding Belloc’s influence on Lafferty this is significant. Lafferty defends his hero. How? By satirizing how Wells sidestepped part of the argument entirely, choosing instead to attack Belloc's credibility and imply intellectual dishonesty, even accusing him of deliberately altering words "in order to allege an inconsistency." This is the rhetorical victory that Lafferty memorably describes as Wells whipping his opponent "with his magnificent display of scorn." It’s the scorn that Lafferty returns to sender.   Lafferty thus bites the bullet. He concedes the immediate point (sea levels are lower during ice ages) to show how scientistic Wells was in fact being. That is a brilliant satirical move. Although Wells was of course right about the dominant outcome of ice ages, his model was simplistic, and Belloc was right to attack its simplicity. The actual sea level is determined by both a global eustatic effect (the change in the ocean's volume) and a local isostatic effect (the vertical movement of the land). Wells championed the eustatic factor as the only one that mattered, while Belloc correctly pointed out that the isostatic rebound was a real phenomenon that complicated the issue. Did Wells know this? Isostasy was formulated in the mid-to-late 19th century decades before the Outline of History debate, primarily by George Airy and John Henry Pratt. However, the application of isostasy to post-glacial rebound gained increasing scientific recognition in the early 20th century, following field studies in Scandinavia and Canada that demonstrated measurable uplift. By the time Wells was writing his major works (1890s–1930s), rebound had been observed, but it wasn’t the fixture of mainstream geology as it is today. In neither the Outline of History  (1920) nor in The Science of Life  (1930), where Wells discusses ice ages, does he go into isostatic rebound. Here is Lafferty making Wells levitate: And when the maximum amount of water has been pumped out of the pond and into the water-tank on the raft, the level of the pond will be so lowered that the raft (with its added load) will now float freely in the air above the lowered level of the pond. We love logic and its relentless conclusions. It is so much more solid a thing than the wispy novelties. But in this case we feel a certain nostalgia for a thing that is impossible.   Because Wells does not acknowledge Belloc’s point, Lafferty can pillory him with the floating raft.   I’ll wrap up with Belloc’s apology to Wells. After conceding his own tactical error in being "too positive" on science in the Outline of History debate, he returned to isostacy: "Mr. Wells was obviously wrong in treating it as certain upon his side, for the whole debate still remains doubtful." Both men lost here but in different ways—Belloc by being forced into a partial public retreat, and Wells by being scientistic—but Lafferty has a clear view on who was the bigger loser. He even showed us his scorecard. ---   Mr. Wells suffers, in this connection, from another fault besides that of stating the old and exploded theories of his youth as facts. He also affirms as fact what is doubtful. Thus he builds a whole series of assertions on the—at first sight—apparently obvious, but, infact, much disputed idea that as the ice receded the sea-level rose. It is clear that the melting of great quantities of ice would, other things being equal, raise the sea-level. It is also presumable, on the isostatic theory, that the earth rose when and where relieved of ice pressure (the raised beaches seem proof of this). That—other things being equal—would mean a lowering of sea-level when the ice melted (thus the highest-known raised beach of glacial times in America indicates a fall of the sea-level since the ice melted by nearly 700 feet). Which of the two factors predominated? Only observation of such phenomena as raised beaches, fossils, submerged forests, etc., can decide, and the matter is still debated. Boule in 1906 affirmed a high sea under glacial conditions. The periods of high glaciation were, according to him, the periods of high sea-level, and the interglacial epochs the periods of low sea-level. Wright (in 1914) inclines to theopposite. The Scandinavian observers noted in one locality a rise of sea level at the first receding of the ice, then a lowering of it. The latest opinion is mainly in favour of a rise in sea-level since the last Ice-age. Coleman, the last authority, tentatively suggests a rise. But to affirm a rise as proved is bad science. In these and many other points Mr. Wells is evidently a man confusing theory with fact. — Hilaire Belloc,  A Companion to Mr. Wells’s Outline of History   (1926) From Mr. Belloc’s feats with Natural Selection we come to his adventures among his ancestors and the fall of man. These are, if possible, even more valiant than his beautiful exposure of the “half-educated assurance” of current biological knowledge. He rushes about the arena, darting from point to point, talking of my ignorance of the “main recent European work in Anthropology,” and avoiding something with extraordinary skill and dexterity. What it is he is avoiding I will presently explain. No one who has read my previous articles need be told that not a single name, not a single paper, iscited from that galaxy of “main recent European” anthropology. With one small exception. There is a well-known savant, M. Marcellin Boule, who wrote of the Grottes de Grimaldi in 1906. Some facetious person seems to have written to Mr. Belloc and told him that M. Boule in 1906 “definitely proved the exact opposite” of the conclusions given by Mr. Wright in his Quaternary Ice Age (1914), and quoted in my Outline . Mr . Belloc writes this down, elevates M. Boule to the magnificence of “Boule” simply and follows up with the habitual insults. By counting from his one fixed mathematical point, zero in some dimension unknown to me, he concludes that I must be twenty years out of date, though the difference between 1906 and 1914, by ordinary ways of reckoning, is really not minus twenty but plus eight. The same ungracious humorist seems to have stuffed up Mr. Belloc with a story that for the last twenty years the climate of the earth has ceased to vary with the eccentricity of the earth’sorbit, and that any natural consequences of the precession of the equinoxes no longer occur; that climate has, in fact, cut loose from astronomical considerations, and that you can find out all about it in the Encyclopædia Britannica . You cannot. Mr. Belloc should have tried. Some day he must find time to puzzle out M. Boule’s curve of oscillation of the Mediterranean and correlate it with Penck’s, and go into the mystery of certain Moustierian implements that M. Boule saysare not Moustierian; and after that he had better read over the little discussion about changes of climate in the Outline of History —it is really quite simply put—and see what it is I really said and what his leg-pulling friend has been up to with him in that matter. It may be kinder to Mr. Belloc to help him with a hint. Croll made an excellentbook in which he pointed out a number of astronomical processes which must produce changes of climate. He suggested that these processes were sufficient to account for the fluctuations of the glacial age. They are not. But they remain perfectly valid causes of climatic variation. Croll is no more done for than Darwin is done for. That is where Mr. Belloc’s friend let Mr. Belloc down. But Mr. Belloc does not always work on the information of facetious friends, and sometimes one is clearly in the presence of the unassisted expert controversialist. When, for example, I say that the Tasmaniansare not racially Neanderthalers, but that they are Neanderthaloid, he can bring himself to alter the former word also to Neanderthaloid in order to allege an inconsistency. And confident that most of his Catholic readers will not check him back by my book, he can ascribe to me views about race for which there is no shadow of justification. Butit is disagreeable to me to follow up such issues, they concern Mr. Belloc much more than they do the living questions under discussion, and I will not even catalogue what other such instances of unashamedcontroversy occur. — H. G. Wells, Mr. Belloc Objects to the Outline of History  (1926) (5) He says that I have attacked him for not accepting the theory thattimes of high glaciation were also times of high sea-level, and viceversa. He says that he has followed in this authorities later than theauthorities of twenty years ago which I quoted. He is perfectly right. I owe him an apology for this, and when my book comes out the passage shall be wholly modified in consonance withrecent work. I over-emphasised the certitude of Boule and others; I admit that the point is in doubt and ought not to be treated as certain. Mr. Wells was obviously wrong in treating it as certain upon his side, for the whole debate still remains doubtful (as, for instance, in the latest work of all, Professor Coleman), but that does not excuse me for having been too positive on my own side. — Hilaire Belloc, Mr. Belloc Still Objects to Mr. Wells’s Outline of History (1927)

Mountains delectable they now ascend, Where Shepherds be, which to them do commend Alluring things, and things that cautious are, Pilgrims are steady kept by faith and fear. — John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress (1678) “By stumbling backwards over no road at all, down hill and through tangled brush, until we found ourselves in the bottom of a pit,” a dour old machine issued. “Then we noticed that the bottom of the pit was actually the top of the Delectable Mountain. If there is nothing lower, then also there is nothing higher. To be in the middle of a plain is the same as to be on the top of a mountain, if all the mountains are gone and forgotten. No, I don't believe that there are any roads, or have ever been. Why should there be roads to get to where we already are? And why should we leave when there is nowhere else to go? What need of roads?” “The Most Forgettable Story in the World” is about a society so perfect that it has forgotten almost everything about itself, its setting a meeting with a theme, “The Insufficiency of Mere Perfection.” Nearly nobody shows up. The few humans and machines who do attend all suffer from lassitude. It doesn’t take them long to realize they can’t discuss the topic well because they share the same problem: collective amnesia. As one character puts it, it’s “a familiar syndrome, this worrying that there is something forgotten.” And it goes beyond forgetting small facts. They have forgotten the meaning of basic words like “hills,” “destination,” and “offspring.” Any understanding of who they are and whence they came? Gone. They try to piece together their history with old stories, and it only makes things more confusing. One machine remembers a fairy tale where they were “princes turned into frogs” (The Fall). A young girl recalls a different story where they were “frogs turned into princes” (Evolution). But what does it matter? The problem is that no one here remembers what a prince or a frog even is. A dour old machine offers another theory: there was no journey or purpose at all. He says they got here by accident, by “stumbling backwards over no road at all . . . until we found ourselves in the bottom of a pit.” The story's ending doesn't bring any resolution. A young man says, “I remember what I have forgotten.” He now remembers that he is missing two things: “My destination and my name.” But when asked if he remembers what his name and destination are, he says, “Oh no, no. I merely remember that they are what I have forgotten.” So he hasn't remembered details, just the concept of having a name and a purpose. To appreciate this one, I propose playing the “What are the best stories to introduce someone to Lafferty" game. As far as the Lafferty fan community goes, this game is all but done. A few years ago, The Best of R. A. Lafferty  (2021) tried to play the game well and screwed it up by not tapping into the fan community. The commentary was often lazy and self-involved, and the selection as unimaginative as “Best Of” collections usually are. I don't need to point out that this game usually defaults to identifying the essentials, the ought-to-haves, the nice-to-haves, and so forth. What is an essential? Honking no-brainers. “Nine Hundred Grandmothers”? There are other ways to play the game. So, a confession about "Nine Hundred Grandmothers." It’s not one of my favorites. I have ideas about it, including what the laughter is about, but I’m not sure the story even makes my top fifty. Of course, I see why "Nine Hundred Grandmothers" is considered one of Lafferty’s best and most memorable stories, and I see why he thought so himself. But if people asked me what to read to get to know Lafferty, they’d run up against my nasty case of not wanting to play the “Best of” version of the how-to-introduce-people-to-Lafferty game. I mention all this because "The Most Forgettable Story in the World” may be the best example of another approach. It’s “best” not in the sense of "Nine Hundred Grandmothers ."  It’s best in the sense of being a shortcut to the RAL nerve center. It programmatically explains much of what Lafferty is about, and so intensely concentrates his preoccupations that one could take any number of directions away from it and be less lost in the lesser known stories and novels. “Nine Hundred Grandmothers" won’t help you much, and may even mislead if you mistake what might look like absurdism. Now contrast it with "The Most Forgettable Story in the World," where we encounter the problems of the large cast of characters, most of whom invite no emotional investment as character; of dialogue overriding action—or rather, of dialogue as intellectual action; and of resolution deferred or absent to put pressure on reader reception. We see major themes and images pulled into synchronous orbit: amnesia; flatland and mountains; humans and machines in contrast with each other, and machines and humans in contrast with other humans and other machines; intergenerational disagreement; the felix culpa  versus the phylogenetic tree; linguistic degradation as the coefficient of cultural decadence. Catholicism (Augustine) and Protestantism (the Delectable Mountain). One could go on. It is a pitch perfect lesson on how amnesia works in Lafferty—amnesia as a double action, double eclipse: first, the onto-amnesia of the Fall, when man was cut off from preternatural graces; and second, the cultural amnesia attending world collapse. Then there is the big one. This is the short story version of “The Day After the World Ended” and the story logic ( in nuce ) of In a Green Tree , the same attack, but not wearing its polite-company face. Instead, we see the vacant, stupidly amnesiac faces of those who must create a new world, the consequence of utopian achievement, and we are thereby in a better position to understand the essay and its summons: "By every definition, this is Utopia. Of course some of us have always regarded Utopia as a calamity, but most of you have not. In its flexibility and in its wide-open opportunities, this is the total Utopia. Anything that you can conceive of, you can do in this non-world. Nothing can stop you except a total bankruptcy of creativity." The story does all this in three pages. If I were assembling the short stories into a super-anthology sequenced by theme, I would be inclined to place "The Most Forgettable Story in the World" first, as a kind of prelude. The choice would be programmatic rather than commercial. After all, the double meaning of the “The Most Forgettable Story in the World” is a joke about the second kind of thing. Theme / Motif “The Most Forgettable Story in the World” (1974) “The Day After the World Ended” (1979) Connection Forgetting & Amnesia Characters obsess over what has been forgotten: roads, mountains, offspring, princes, and the concept of destination. The essay stresses impenetrable amnesia  after the end of Western/Modern Civilization—people can’t remember the old world clearly. Both treat forgetting  as the defining human condition: memory loss is the barrier to meaning. Search for Identity A young man recalls only that what he has forgotten is his name  and destination . Cites Plato: man once defined as “a being in search of meaning,” but now man no longer searches. Identity is tied to memory and purpose—without remembering, identity collapses. World Already Ended Perfect world where everyone and everything has forgotten their origins, implying history/world is already gone. Essay insists the world (Western Civilization) ended between 1912–1962; we are living in Flatland , post-catastrophe. Both argue the “end of the world” has already happened, not some future event. Utopia as Ruin / Emptiness Perfection is meaningless. Characters can’t define basic words, yet claim the world is “perfect.” Present is a “Utopia” of total freedom, but nothing grows, the world is barren, uncreative. Utopia is not fulfillment but stasis, sterility, or void. Metaphors of Roads / Paths Machines and people wonder about roads that led to perfection, only to conclude there are none. The essay describes us plowing a “field that isn’t there anymore” and wandering in ruins. Both use path/road/field metaphors to convey disorientation and loss of trajectory. Collective Condition of Oblivion Forgetting is universal: no one remembers “frog” or “prince” or even “destination”. Amnesia is collective: destruction took away even recollection itself; “all the looking-glasses were broken”. Shared insistence that this is not personal but universal amnesia . Question of Renewal Hints of a forgotten story about mankind’s origin and destination. Lost but once known. Toynbee’s “Phoenix Syndrome.” Civilizations reborn from ashes, the possibility of a new creation. Both end by raising the question: can mankind remember or build again?