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Spring Break here in Houston, so I'm off to Tulsa to do some more work on Lafferty. The blog will be quiet for a few days.

“Leaving aside all testimony of religion and revelation, I believe that a competent interdisciplinary biologist, working without prejudices, would come onto substantial evidence for the existence of unbodied beings or mentalities, from the effect they have on human persons; just as a competent interdisciplinary physicist-astronomer would arrive at the necessity of there being a moon of such a size and gravity and location and distance, even though, for some reason, the moon lacked the quality of visibility. And the physicist-astronomer would realize this necessity for such a moon from its influence on the earth. The biologist-psychologist should arrive at the necessity of the Devil-Satan, of such a power and location and activation-pattern, because of his influence on human persons." Interview And after a while, Jeannie began to play devil's music,and Evil uncoiled like a snake and slid into the room. The lights in the world went out, and the torches were lit in Hell; and the melodrama began on the little stage. The world shuddered on its axis, and the villain was prince of the world. Once more the odd passion came on Barnaby. An animal surge went through the crowd as the noble hero and the trilling heroine and the dark villain acted out the oldest epic in the world. “Will you still have the melodrama?” “Well, no. But we'll have skits. Well, not skits really; we'll have ukulele players and things like that. You'll like it.” “There's only one thing bothers me.” “What, dear?” “In the Twenties, how did they know who was the villain?” Let’s start very wide and trivial. Is “Golden Gate” Lafferty’s first fantasia about lapsitting, that odd paraphilia that appears so often in his work, along with piggyback riding? Not much has been said to explain either cathexis, though Gregorio Montejo has interpreted lapsitting as a synecdoche for sex. I’m not so sure. My suspicion is simpler: Lafferty may just have liked sitting on laps and getting piggyback rides from the ladies. Not that either act is somehow unsexual or unflirtatious. It is somehow bound up with adrenarche in Lafferty. Oh, and yes: “Golden Gate” is a brilliant Lafferty story, written in 1958. As with the brilliant “Wagons,” it is set against a musical backdrop, with the shift in theme from the 1890s to the 1920s keyed to songs. One should know the songs to appreciate how successful the story is. IT makes a great companion piece to "Selenium Ghosts." Highly underrated. First, the story Our main character is a young man named Barnaby who patronizes the Golden Gate Bar. It isn’t in California, but because the sophomores we read about in it attend City College, I’d place it in America, not Europe, probably in the New York-to-Boston corridor. The Golden Gate itself is a family-friendly saloon with a gimmick. It has a Gay Nineties motif, with group singing and a nightly melodrama. Kids can get huge steins of cider. We quickly learn that Barnaby is infatuated with the owner, Margaret, and her two daughters, Jeannie and Jenny (one of Lafferty mother- parthens ), who play the piano and the heroine in the stage show, respectively. Over the course of one week, Barnaby watches the performances and develops an intense fixation on the stage villain, Blackie. He becomes convinced that the actor is an actual embodiment of evil, a real devil. Lafferty tells the story in a day-by-day sequence in which Barnaby drinks with patrons, including college sophomores and seamen, while repeatedly expressing his desire to shoot the villain. As the story progresses, the companions and all else become increasingly odd and heightened. Finally, on Thursday night, Barnaby attends the bar with a group of refinery workers and brings the six-shot revolver he has been thinking about all week. He has it loaded with five blanks and one live bullet. As the melodrama reaches its climax and the crowd hisses at the stage, Barnaby draws his trembling weapon and unloads all six shots at Blackie. For a moment, he thinks he has shot and killed Blackie, and he experiences a deep sense of peace and states, "I have killed the villain." But Blackie is somehow unharmed. He finishes his performance. Margaret later approaches Barnaby's table, white-faced, to reprimand him for the dangerous stunt. On Friday afternoon, Barnaby goes back to the Golden Gate. He finds Blackie playing the piano and says that one of the fired shots was real. Blackie says he knows. He dug the live bullet out of the plaster. He then says he is leaving to work at Kate's Klondike Bar because the Golden Gate is changing its theme to a 1920s speakeasy. Everything about this encounter is depressing. That evening, the bar debuts its new era with flapper waitresses and ukulele music. Barnaby sees that it is dismal. He visits Blackie's room, where the actor is packing, asks for the location of the new bar, and decides to move to that town so he can get a job and continue watching the traditional melodrama. I think the most important line in "Golden Gate" is not its brilliant and memorable opening: When you have shot and killed a man you have in some measure clarified your attitude toward him. You have given a definite answer to a definite problem. For better or worse you have acted decisively. Instead, it can be found in Tuesday night's throwaway survey: “A survey reveals that eighty percent of the people believe in Heaven but only twenty percent in Hell,” said Veronica. “That is like believing in up but not down, in a disc of only one side, a pole with a top but no bottom, Making Love to Alice Bly, in light but not in darkness.” In this theological melodrama about good and evil with a lot of attention given to the devil, Lafferty's Barnaby belongs to the minority, and the story is an account of what that minority perception demands. The Golden Gate Bar, in its 1890s gimmick, is the institutional form through which the twenty percent's vision becomes briefly available to the eighty. Good and evil exist. You can see them being laid out almost liturgically in the nightly melodrama, with the gas torches, piano, and communal hissing. Like liturgy, it demands participation. This one happens to concentrate diffuse evil into a visible figure with a name: Blackie. When the Golden Gate goes to a 1920s theme, this kind of figure has no place. In its environment, just as in the environment of the Modernist literature of the 1920s, there are social ills, accidents, and psychological facts, but there isn’t really any evil. This is just to say that the old Golden Gate (with its allusion to heaven, not to San Francisco) is a place where people get together to share a moral response, not merely pleasure. We see this in the crowd's reaction to the stage show: And when the crowd howled “No! No! No!” in simulated fury, it was not entirely simulated. And there were some who crowed “Yes! Yes!” wickedly against the crowd; and one of these was Hazel, bright-eyed and panting, as she felt the evil, like a dog in the corner, rise within her. We see it when Barnaby achieves real clarity after firing (why doubt this clarity?). The ritual produces results because it makes the real thing really confrontable. Now consider the women's fondness for Blackie. That wouldn’t be a counter-argument because they are among the eighty percent, not the twenty. Hence, when the bar converts into a Twenties speakeasy, we can see that what is lost goes beyond nostalgia, though Lafferty uses nostalgia and melodrama to code his point. It looks to me that Lafferty is doing something that is nearly liturgical. A community gets together to participate in a shared moral vision. There is room for the twenty who believe in Hell. The new Golden Gate of the 1920s will be different because it is hedonistic. It is organized around eighty percent. There is irony, dissipation, and moral exhaustion. That is what happens when the ritual goes away. Evil does not disappear; it becomes invisible. It is from within this context that I would read Barnaby's closing decision to follow Blackie to Kate's Klondike Bar. Where the twenty percent go, the confrontation continues. A postmodern reading is pretty easy to work out, which I am going to do to sharpen up the contradictions. Barnaby is a rum-dum, as Lafferty’s narrator says, using a great piece of 1890s slang (Lafferty is always amazing with small stuff like this). Oxford English Dictionary Enry Barnaby makes the mistake of thinking he is the hero. He’s an instance of the hypodermic theory of media, where playing too many video games leads one to go out and shoot up a school. His perception is a category error because he has mistaken a theatrical convention for reality: It was clear to Barnaby that Blackie was really a villain. Not everybody knew this. A melodrama villain is only black behind the lights. Off stage he should have a heart of gold. [. . . ] That is no myth. Here it was not entirely true. The story exposes and corrects that mistake. Blackie, offstage and sad at the piano, is demystifying. Barnaby goes with him because he wants to live in that old world of nostalgia and melodrama, even if it is not the real world. The Friday elegy is the cost of clarity: Everybody sang together the music of Jeannie, and the only lights in the place were those old gas lights. Something went out of the world with them. These new lights, they have no smell to them, they have no flicker or real glow. You can't reach up and light a cigar or dramatically burn a letter. It's almost as though they weren't alive. Now that the gaslights on the stage are gone, we see what is real. On this reading, the story could be about the seductiveness and inadequacy of simple moral forms, and the Twenties represent a more honest, if colder, relationship with complexity. Is this how most people feel? The 1920s are loved as a playground, but there is almost no popular sentimentality for the 1890s. So, yes, Lafferty is doing something complicated (again) in this masterful early story. He is making Barnaby a real hero while keeping him very, very small and silly. It comes down to where one sees the irony. The postmodern reading shrinks the melodrama. The simple moral form of melodrama is naïve, and the story knows it is. Hence, Barnaby is deluded. An antimodern reading says hold up: Lafferty liked the melodrama and approved of moral vision, just as he loved the old Hairbreadth Harry comic strips and the melodrama scenarios he put into “Selenium Ghosts of the Eighteen-Seventies.” And he believed in the devil. My reading places the irony as facing the Twenties: its surface sophistication is moral naïveté, because it mistakes invisibility for absence. Friday really is the depressing prelude to it. Lafferty makes it hard for the reader because wisdom is being counterfigured in what can easily, and justifiably, be interpreted as Barnaby’s rum-dum escapism and flight into melodrama. On the antimodern reading, we throw in with Barnaby and Blackie and go to Kate's Klondike Bar because a melodramatic moral vision is better than no moral vision at all. Lafferty says the Golden Gate has nothing to do with San Francisco. How odd that no one has bothered to notice it has to do with heaven. A soundtrack of the songs mentioned in "Golden Gate": "Already, through the early crowd there was running a tide of resentment toward the seamen; and this only for their insistence that all the songs that night should be sea songs. Now there is nothing wrong with “As I was A-walking Down Paradise Street — With a Ho Ho Blow The Man Down,” but it has seventeen choruses, and when it is sung seventeen times, that makes either two hundred and eighty-nine or two hundred and ninety-nine. That is too much." My point is only that I do not think the relation is synecdochic. If it is, then we have a problem, NASA, because of how often these two motifs are connected with children. In the first volume of In a Green Tree , for instance, we learn about Turnabout Parties, where the little boys rode on the backs of the little girls. That sounds like something Lafferty made up, but if I could ask the man a set of questions, one of them would be: did those parties exist? In any case, we still lack a good explanation for this aspect of his work, if there is one beyond something like Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s liking for cross-eyed girls, and that is simply the end of it.

“Your machine can say how old a thing will be in its totality, but it can’t say how old a thing is right now?”— “Mostly it can do both. The present orientation can nearly always be coaxed out of it, though the clock considers the present of little importance. This is no gadgetry, people. It is positive science and it is wonderful.” “The block has solved many problems of involution and devolution,” Barnaby said. “Naturally the clock does not accept evolution, or has any intelligent person in [?] accepted it in a lifetime. This is more than quibbling over names. It’s the rejection of a one-dimension thing that was wrong-minded in its single dimension . . . . Historically, Darwin was not the first scientist who propounded sequence evolution. He was, thankfully, the last. But the involution of the world is the widest and most textured of all fields, except the full[?] field that contains it. Ya, the clock will solve [hundreds/thousands/?] of problems here.” — Handwritten draft pages for "Barnaby’s Clock" Advanced Lafferty. Summary starts in black, if you want nuts and bolts. “Barnaby’s Clock” is the first appearance of the beloved Austro. Lafferty usually threw away the scaffolding for these stories. This time we are lucky to have some surviving traces of his process. They tell us a few interesting things about The Men Who Knew Everything  ( TMWKE  ) sequence. For instance, they tell us about why Lafferty created Austro, and about how “Barnaby’s Clock” relates to the other stories in the sequence inspired by Watkin. This is especially relevant to the four-part demonstration of Green/Life: “The Ungodly Mice of Doctor Drakos,” “The Two-Headed Lion of Cris Benedetti,” “The Hellacious Rocket of Harry O’Donovan,” and “The Wooly World of Barnaby Sheen.” All four parts of that single set are related to “Barnaby’s Clock,” which deals with violet/the practical sciences in Watkin’s scheme. “Barnaby’s Clock” rejects theistic evolution; the four-part story set is about life, both physical and spiritual. Evolution is an explanation for the history of life on earth, if not abiogenesis. Lafferty despises it, just as he castigated abiogenesis in an essay. He wrote, Make a pile of chemicals roughly equivalent to the chemical elements and compounds of a human body. Let the pile set overnight. And I bet you all the money I have that it won't have turned into a living human being by morning. Persons such as Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan say that tens of thousands (maybe tens of millions) of planets will fulfill the conditions for the support of life. And then they take the rather deceptive step from the ‘possibility of life’ to the ‘inevitability of life’ by such connivance as would shame a crooked gambler. They posit towering numbers of ‘civilizations’ on those ‘possibility-of-life planets’, at least half of them to be more advanced than the Civilization of Earth and Humankind. But there is a strong element of Advocacy Science in this. There is a great and powerful lobby advocating the existence of great numbers of superior civilizations. One reason for this is that the secular-liberal-agnostic-relativistic faction of scientists cannot allow the uniqueness of anything, not of Earth, not of Life, certainly not of Human Life, most certainly not of existing Human Civilization. To allow the uniqueness of any of these things, they would have to cease to be secular-liberal-agnostic-relativistic persons. And the shock of changing their style would kill all of them. Science Fiction also has a vested interest in there being a multiplicity of inhabited worlds and civilizations. That is one of the small number of things that Science Fiction is about. But Science Fiction is, after all, only a fiction. The issues this post tracks are convoluted, so I will begin with some context, move to a summary, start teasing apart what is going on, and circle back to context. This is really for those who want to puzzle out what is going on as Lafferty creates his second great story sequence. The goal is always a deeper, richer Lafferty people can argue with. The best way I know to start is with a few details bearing on how The Men Who Knew Everything  came to be. Lafferty finished the first story of what later became the sequence on January 23, 1970, when he completed his Valentinian horror story “The All-At-Once Man.” One will hear it said at times that there are the early TMWKE stories and then there are the Austro stories. That misses the architecture. The first story belongs to another very important level of the later fictional universe of In a Green Tree involving Helen and John , but it also stands as an odd precursor to the TMWKE sequence itself. It could exist on its own. I read it that way. When Lafferty fits the story into the sequence, note that he places it next to YELLOW and calls it HIGH-BRASS: PSEUDO-CHROMATIC. Now look at the compositional dates of the stories. You will see what happened. He returned to the story world of John Penandrew and “The All-At-Once Man” a year later when he decided to create the Watkin sequence we know as TMWKE , which ultimately outgrew its Watkin conception and became the Austro stories we love. An aside. Although the TMWKE  stories were mostly worked out before In a Green Tree and have been obviously far more visible, I think it is better to see them as a displacement of the Green Tree  materials, which came together in 1978, about which more in a moment. That is counterintuitive in terms of reception and composition but not in terms of artistic shaping. Lafferty reconfigures the earlier materials. That will be part of understanding the Whole Lafferty. If retro-causality exists anywhere (it does in Origen’s metaphysics of prophecy), it does in art. The next point is that Lafferty did not have a story sequence with Austro in mind when he wrote “Mud Violet,” nor did he have Austro in mind when he started “Barnaby’s Clock.” This is similar to Epiktistes’s absence from the first Institute stories. Again, Lafferty ha a good story with the John Penandrew piece. More than that. It is a weird little masterpiece. He likes his characters. Beginning with the second TMWKE story, “Mud Violet,” however, John Penandrew is out of the picture. Lafferty is going to write a real sequence, and he is going to be ambitious. We will learn much more about John Penandrew and his doomed younger brother, David, in Green Tree  when Lafferty develops that material in returning to the character at the center of the first of his TMWKE  stories. John Penandrew will be of major importance in Green Tree , his wife being one of Lafferty’s four great female characters (in my view). But for now, Lafferty begins writing a different kind of story inspired by Watkin’s 1932 meditation on Catholic ontology. Thus, the first story in the actual sequence (conceived of as a sequence) is the second written one , “Mud Violet,” which Lafferty finished a year later, on January 2, 1971. In it, he mentions Watkin. And begins at the low end of Watkin’s spectrum with what Lafferty calls hylicon (from the Greek hyle ), which is mud violet. He planned to attack the colors/angstroms in order, which he starts doing. It will be systematic until it isn’t. That is something Lafferty readers should discuss. Again, the dates. As an exercise, let’s trace the line from “Mud Violet” and “Barnaby’s Clock” to In a Green Tree  and back again to “Barnaby’s Clock” and “Mud Violet.” There are many ways to do this, but I want to focus on Barnaby and Loretta Sheen first. It is the simplest, high reward route. Let’s go for the cheap points first. In his notes, Lafferty has the following story idea: Seven young teenagers die violently, one by one but in a short period of time. Most are out of the families of the Fundamental Barrenness. [?] they have become their own manifestations. The [?] are narrated from the Poltergeist point of view. They come to, they come to their own point of view. They are a blind-end humor, they are trapped, they are a blind-end and cannot grow up except one or two of them, and can [?] [?] go in even more horrible direction. Some speculation. This note is the basis for Edmund Weakfish’s wicked class on participation psychology ("Mud Violet"), in which Loretta Sheen and her classmates die through suicide. That results in Loretta becoming the sawdust-filled doll and the manifestation of poltergeist girl Mary Mondo. Lafferty seems to fiddle with the "one or two of them," and the terrible direction becomes Mary and Loretta. There is also the specter of Catholic suicide here. At this point, Lafferty has not yet decided what he will do with Loretta and Mary. Each character will become intriguing. When Lafferty goes on next to write “Barnaby’s Clock,” he has moved from the spooky nature of hylicon (again, inspired by Watkin and suicide) to practical violet. Loretta Sheen and Mary Mondo are now present and in their doll and ghost forms as we know them. Importantly, Barnaby is not married. He seems never to have been. His friends don’t even remember him having a wife. When Lafferty later writes the fourth part of Green Tree , he has worked out the full story about this on that other fictional plane. Barnaby there is married to the brilliant and beautiful Monica MacLish. Both of them are fully part of the complex Green Tree itself. But we are told a secret about that perfect seeming married couple, the ingenious Sheens. Readers of the Austro stories do not yet know this unless they have read the unpublished material. Barnaby Sheen is not in fact Loretta’s biological father. She is the product of an affair, for he was cuckolded, and he knows it. Yet he loves Loretta, and continues to be cuckolded. Loretta know it. Her suicide and Barnaby’s refusal to believe she really killed herself (because of the manipulation of Edmund Weakfish, the Putty Dwarf) is the tragedy of Barnaby’s life. And in one of the sadder moments in Lafferty, one that greatly deepens the TMWKE  sequence, we read the following exchange between Barnaby and Loretta: “Mama gets up awful early,” ‘doll’ said to Barnaby Sheen in her strained and rasping voice. “I look down through the window. A friend comes to mama while it’s still dark, but it begins to get light when he leaves. They lie on that biggest stone bench with the red padding on it. I talk too much. It hurts me.” “Then neither of us will talk of it further, Loretta,” Barnaby said. “It hurts me too.” With all this in mind, we can see the large Barnaby-Loretta circle. It runs from the first of the real sequenced stories in TMWKE , “Mud Violet,” to the last completed volume of Green Tree . At that point, Barney’s full arc comes into view on two levels of stereoscopic fictional reality, TMWKE and Green Tree . In the late seventies, Lafferty uses the TMWKE  materials of the early seventies to build to the very deep world of In a Green Tree . At the beginning, though, there was no Green Tree, but its possibility was latent: after all, Lafferty had written himself in as Laff. Lafferty seems to have been both fascinated by Watkin’s idea of color and irritated by Watkin’s views on what we would now call theistic evolution, which Lafferty of course rejected . To see what Watkin believes, one needs to have read the Green chapter in Watkin, which I will include at the end of this post; and one needs to be familiar with what Lafferty is doing with LIFE in the four Green stories that Centipede Press has broken apart because they aren’t relying on Lafferty academics. On my reading, Lafferty’s irritation with Watkin is apparent in the first of the real sequence stories, “Mud Violet,” which I will explain when I cover that difficult story. It is not just that Lafferty is color-coding stories , as if he were playing a game that illustrates Watkin. Lafferty didn’t need colors to gin up story concepts. He argues with Watkin. Why think this? We have evidence. In the disordered early fragments of the story that introduce us to Austro, there is no Austro. Barnaby's clock looks to be just a chronometer, some kind of clock that disproves evolution. Understanding that and what happens in the big circle with Austro and Barnaby-Loretta will be the goal of the rest of this post. “Barnaby’s Clock” begins with two false starts that place the reader in a position to think about the nature of time, the age of various earthly objects, and the unreliability of scientific clocks: “The Lead/Alpha-Particle-Ratio clock can be trusted only as far as its zircon crystals,” the cosmologist went on, “and I sure wouldn't burn my back on a bunch of zircon crystals. None of the RadioCarbon clocks is any good, and the Carbon-Fourteen clock is the worst of them all. You must always multiply its results by two or five or ten or even fifty to get a scientifically acceptable answer and I feel guilty every time I do that.” It then moves to the central plot, which takes place in the home of Barnaby Sheen. Barnaby gathers the other TMWKE into his dynamic study—which contains the sawdust-filled doll host of his daughter Loretta and resident spirit Mary Mondo—to announce his creation of a "magic clock" that can determine the age and essence of anything in the world. Over his first evening, the TMWKE hear strange vocalizations that sound like "Carrock." They come from a newly partitioned room (Barney can move the walls of his home), which Barnaby attributes to a sensitive, smart new servant who is struggling to learn how to prepare drinks. We then skip forward to the next evening. Barnaby hosts a larger demonstration of the clock for an audience. It includes several eminent scientists, with a fun callback to "Boomer Flats." (Barnaby has planned the night carefully to coincide with Willy McGilly being out of town.) Participants drop items such as coins, rocks, and fossils into the machine's slot. Questions are asked. A rigged typewriter prints out their questions as well as the answers, ages, and origins of the objects. The presentation falls into chaos when the clock starts assigning implausibly recent dates to prehistoric fossils. This culminates in the claim that the Australopithecus tooth is only fifty-five years old: “Fifty-five years since the inanimation or death of the creature,” it typed, “and seventy-seven years since its birth.” And all those great visitors howled like maniacs at that poor machine of a clock. But the “Carrock, carrock” in the next room had turned into a chortle. “Any fool would know that it has to be over a million years old,” August Angstrom swore furiously. “Clock, do you even know what it is?” The audience is outraged when the machine types that this ancient species (here Lafferty is still calling it a species, not a genus) never went extinct. It just restricted itself to a small homeland in Ethiopia. Some of the people present dismiss the demonstration as a fraudulent joke and angrily storm out. Once only Barnaby’s inner circle remains, the nature of the evening's events comes out. Barnaby confesses that the magic clock was an elaborate hoax. He was working the typewriter with a concealed remote control in his palm, though he claims the theatrical exercise will help him invent a functional version in the future. The marvel of the gathering is then introduced. It is, of course, our Austro, a living, juvenile Australopithecus, this time wearing a white jacket when he comes from the partitioned room: It, he, came into the room then. He had on a neat white bartender's jacket. He had a pad and pencil in his hands. He was grinning, he was hairy, he was simian in some rakish way, he was manlike or at least boylike in a more subtle way, and he was eager to be of service. He proves himself to be a willing and capable bartender. Important clues about Austro's role are dropped, ones that will be used in the stories that followed. The earliest handwritten drafts of “Barnaby’s Clock” do not make Austro the literal/metaphorical clock. Lafferty seems not yet to have known what he wanted to do with the story; he knew only that there would be a clock, and what is especially interesting is that he abandoned the explicit anti-evolution angle as he lightened the story. Originally, there was no Austro, but there is an exchange absent from the published text in which the clock is asked the age of Consciousness. It answers that all markers of the present fall outside, or before, the frame of its shape. This implies that consciousness is either at its very beginning or not yet fully realized, tying into Lafferty's mutational jump and spiritual leap theme. Another question in manuscript material concerns the age and form of the Amnesia: the condition of radical unknowing that the manuscripts present as humanity’s constitutive situation and as the deepest subject the clock could address. This is, of course, Lafferty’s great amnesia theme. It is already here, orienting the first of the sequenced TMWKE stories, and it becomes the great theme of In a Green Tree , both as an act of historical recovery and as a history of cultural amnesia. Then there is Darwinian evolution. We know how much Lafferty hated Darwin from the dozens of times he tells us this. Consider how he damns Darwin in “Claudius and Charles.” That is I why think the next point is not a careless inferential leap. Lafferty’s frustration with Darwin is what led him to make Austro the clock. In the manuscript, Barnaby says that sequential evolution “tried to set the whole of the many-dimensions thing onto a single time-line,” and that “a long fish does not turn into a shark, any more than one brother turns into another.” This is the core of the story: the idea that linear biological succession misrepresents nature, which is instead lateral, simultaneous, and multidimensional. That diagnosis is built into the clock. It is why the story spends so much time on evolutionary dating methods, each of which assumes a single measurable axis and differs only in the isotope ratio it trusts. In the published story, the Australopithecus  tooth goes into the slot. The clock returns fifty-five years since death and seventy-seven since birth. The investigators storm out because a living memory Australopithecus  ruins the narrative of human history around which evolutionary theory is organized. So here is a question: what is Barnaby’s whole clock? It looks like three things to me: a con game; a person, Austro; and an ontological claim. All come together in Barnaby's big speech: "It analyzes shape and texture and so arrives at essence, Cris,” Barnaby said with the sudden seriousness of a prophet or con-man. “The texture of anything in the world or out of it must depend on the size and shape and total age of that thing. This applies to a physical thing, to a social-group thing, to a tenuous syndrome or behaviorism, to an historical complex . . . ” Barnaby’s entire speech seems to say something like this: the texture of any entity (its readable density and grain) is a function of its size, shape, and total age. Because the relation is necessary rather than contingent, it is invertible. Given a precise reading of texture, the clock can reveal the age, but there is a rub: it can only do so while conveying the essence inseparable from that age. This applies across ontological categories without restriction: physical objects, social formations, behavioral patterns, historical complexes, persons, and the electrostatic beings that arise at the intersections of persons are all available. The one defined exclusion is the deadly arts and sciences. Lafferty says they lack sufficient texture to be read because (I take it) there is nothing in them to read. The clock has one real limitation (really its enabling condition): it considers the present moment of little importance and has difficulty locating it within a thing's total texture (because its total texture is the one moment). The clock can say how old a thing will be in its totality more readily than it can say where in that totality the thing currently stands ("Mostly it can do both. The present orientation can nearly always be coaxed out of it, though the clock considers the present of little importance"). Someone on East of Laughter said the story says Barnaby is in his mid-thirties, but we know he is in his fifties, so that is a mystery. It isn't a mystery. Lafferty's joke is that this proves the clock is right by looking like the clock is wrong. The clock just hasn't been coaxed out about Barnaby's present age. A vitalist corollary follows from the weird causal model Lafferty sets up. If texture is a necessary product of size, shape, and total age, then a thing genuinely alive in its field (that is, fully extended into its duration, fully realized in its form) will produce richer, denser, more readable texture than a thing that persists without living. The clock's readings are therefore not neutral measurements. Barnaby's wristwatch will not run when he is angry or feeling bad—"It will not run on bad time." Negative being disrupts it. At the end of the story, Austro enters the TMWKE  sequence, and the sequence is changed as profoundly as it is when Epikt pops up in the Institute stories. In “Barnaby’s Clock,” Barnaby has been putting on a show, yet the appearance of Austro confirms everything the theatrical demonstration could not prove. On the surface, the magic clock show was a hoax, which is why Barnaby did not want Willy McGilly present. McGilly can flense any hoax. Barnaby was working the typewriter by concealed remote, then looking at the specimens on the conveyor belt and dialing in the answers himself. Yet the demonstration was built around a real principle, and that is what the Australopithecus  tooth shows. When the tooth goes into the slot, the clock returns fifty-five years since death and seventy-seven since birth. The audience storms out because this means that the species is still present, in the “one moment,” as it were. That would destroy the evolutionary narrative around which the field is organized. It is the scientific story that “Barnaby’s Clock” was conceived to attack. In the manuscript notes, Lafferty writes, “‘Your clock should be able to settle the question of evolution,’ said Dr. Drakos.” The clock is built against being taken in. Sequential evolution misrepresents supranature, and the clock reads nature from above as it actually is. It is more than one-dimensional, as Lafferty puts it. Austro walking out of the partitioned room in a white jacket, willing and ready to mix a Cuba Libre for Laff, is the proof of some sort of surprising temporal coinherence. Why did Lafferty change his mind about making the attack on evolution so overt and cut it? Probably for just that reason: there is no ambiguity about where Lafferty stands in the handwritten material, and he was not yet ready to go this far in his fiction. I have been told by a convention goer that Lafferty was not at reluctant to tell you his views on evolution at cons. I think Lafferty created Austro in part because Watkin irritated and fascinated him. We owe Watkin some gratitude. In The Bow in the Cloud , Watkin argues for theistic evolution by trying to reconcile the “phenomenal” mechanisms of science with the “noumenal” reality of metaphysics. He argues that evolution and what looks like natural selection is the creative activity of God viewed “from below.” He also points to a teleological hierarchy of being in which the “progressive rationalisation and spiritualisation of matter” is driven by the Creator Spiritus , rather than by blind clockwork forces alone. With some of that, Lafferty probably agreed. Where he did not agree was in treating emergent evolution and divine creation as two aspects of the same fact. Watkin holds that biological complexities act as a “lens” reflecting “Divine Light,” allowing for the appearance of novel forms, vegetative, sentient, and rational, whenever matter is sufficiently prepared. Elements of that do ring true to Lafferty, as we see at the end of Past Master  and with Epikt. The problem was Darwin and how much ground could be ceded. "Barnaby's Clock" has been thought of as being pretty slight, but it is a keystone for Lafferty’s second major story sequence, both in its own development and in its relation to the wider displacements of the Whole Lafferty. To pull Austro into the Barnaby-Loretta circle, Loretta dies in "Mud Violet," Austro next becomes Barnaby's clock in “Barnaby’s Clock,” and Barnaby's clock gives Loretta peace through time in Incidents of Travel in Flatland: It was the always cheerful Austro, boy magician and exchange genius, on the morning of the day on which he left for Africa from his two years residence in the neighborhood, who gave “doll” and that scrap of somebody's personality that lingered in her, her peace and her rest. “You go to sleep now, ‘doll’, and continue to sleep,” he told her. “Oh? For how long?” she asked. “Oh, for a thousand years,” he said.“That won't seem very long if I'm asleep, will it,” she said. “It hurts me to talk.” “No, not long at all,” Austro assured her. Note that the Austro stories are a two-year sequence. The dates again. “Long” is subordinate to greater texture on Barnaby’s clock.

The first of a series of posts. For about a month, I have been typing up a Lafferty compendium, which is full of fascinating material: a partially written Camiroi story about a rhino fair, clues to the “Men Who Knew Everything” story sequence, an abandoned sequel to “Slow Tuesday Night,” reasonably worked out stories such as the "The Wheel and the Shoosh" about the invention of time/being and space, abandoned poetry, where Lafferty derived titles (“And Mad Undancing Bears”), how he cross-codes characters, the other Aurelia called To Aurelia with Horns , and sundry projects that never came to pass, such as a plan to rewrite (or revise) "Cabrito” and dozens of unwritten stories. To give a sense of the fun things in it, a little of Lafferty’s busted material: [1 — Glass eye passage:] the glass eye. I used it after I lost one of my baby eyes and before I ~~got~~ [it?] got my permanent eye. [2 — Narrator not real:] the narrator gradually discovers that he is not real, that he is a standing joke made up by a bunch of young people as a ~~catch~~-all for their ~~[?]~~ imaginations. [3 — ‘Browobust’ / witchcraft:] ‘[Pass?] — Browobust. / In contrast to this (witchcraft) it will be noted that the good miracles . . . one always [?] acts of [?] restoration. [4 — Eagle / noble creature:] Where has the eagle been denominated a noble creature? There must be some mistaken identity here. [Note: Past Master , Barry Malzberg poem, “Leptophlebo”] [5 — Certain men / Comets:] {circled:} Certain men return at wide intervals like Comets. And, after a while, the intervals become more irregular, and the men begin to break up [?] [?] falls off him. [Note: “Boomer Flats”] [6 — Biological significance / adolescence:] Is there biological significance, even signs of a mutation, in the greatly lengthened adolescence, the long receptive and nocturne period between thirteen and twenty-five? [7 — Guardian angel / rat:] Like guardian angels, there is a rat for every person in the world. That last is particularly wonderful.

The "Distinction and Adornment of the World" is a scholastic phrase which covers our own province and position. The ‘Distinction’ is the special focusing on our own world apart from the billions of other worlds, all special, but not all special to us. It is the scale and site we are on. The ‘Adornment’ is the process and movement and composition, and finally the Flora and Fauna (including ourselves). Sure, we are an adornment, and so is all the other furniture of the world. The ‘Procession of Creatures’ is another scholastic phrase. I am sure you have been taught, somewhere in your five years of Catholic schools, that the Son proceeds eternally from the Father, and that the Holy Ghost proceeds eternally from both the Father and the Son. This is the main Procession. But I am not sure that you were taught that every creature proceeds evitemally (having beginning but not end) from the Holy Trinity. This is the ‘Procession of Creatures.’ There is an anti-scientific secular religion named Darwinism which calls this Procession ‘Evolution by Natural Selection.’ It would be better called ‘by Supernatural Selection.’ That a Procession is also a Parade is all to the good. We have a favored place in the Parade of Creatures. Several of my characters are able to explain these things much better than I am. Unfortunately, they are never around to be interviewed when I want things from them a little more exactly. — Interview with Paul Walker, 1977 “How thin and tinny and how few in number had been the objects in our old field of view! How mediocre in color and how undistinguished in style it had all been! How un-flamboyant the world had been before this!” “Make Sure the Eyes are Big Enough” is interesting. It clarifies Lafferty’s thoughts about personhood, especially his full extension of the concept of the person. A fairly late story, it is what he called a joyful entertainment, one that takes the doors off his typical technique of noetic darkening. He does what he very rarely does: he reverses the current. Here, as in “Jack Bang’s Eyes,” instead of the eyes being devices of epistemic closure as they open, they open onto the sacramental creation. It is also perhaps his most overtly metaphysical, anti-Gnostic story. He is oddly unguarded. He is happy, having fun, and being both silly yet serious about a matter of significance. It really is joyful. I am glad he wrote it. That said, it is not a story I particularly enjoy. I like Lafferty in his darker moods or when he is a little gremliny; and I will always take one of his broody operatic stories, such as “Ishmael Unto the Barrens” or “And Mad Undancing Bears,” or a minor black story such as “Thou Whited Wall” or a sullen stare-down such as “And Name My Name , ” over his late scherzos. Not for nothing is my favorite Lafferty story the minor but wonderful “Berryhill.” In “Make Sure the Eyes are Big Enough,” Lafferty gambles big on the brilliant idea of a sensual pleroma as the total rejection of the Gnostic pleroma. The narrator explains early in the story, this pleroma is amultisensory apprehension of reality’s hidden depths: The new experience or discovery was a wider range of seeing and sensing. It was the quick cognition of animations and people and off-people and pantograms and joyous beasts and monsters that had heretofore been invisible. It was seeing the other nine-tenths of the world in its racing brightness, and the realizing that the one-tenth of the world that had always been visible was comparatively a little bit sub-par. It was — well, it was the sensual pleroma, the fulfillment, the actualization, all this laced with the excited “Hey, where have you guys been!” motif. The previously invisible nine-tenths of the world is filled with racing brightness, quasi-humans, astonishing animals, primordial fauna, and mythical creatures. Phenomenal psychologist Rusty McSlim learns of it after attaching a microscopic camera to the eye of his daughter, Mary Crisis. Rusty’s bedridden grandmother, Mary Imperial, wants to live vicariously through Mary C.’s daily activities. Mary C. and her friends first experience this expanded reality, which they refer to as the "Big Circus," and, unknown to anyone, it is being triggered by chewing gum. Rusty soon experiences the multi-sensory phenomenon himself. Being a phenomenal psychologist, he realizes the scope of the newly visible world. Lafferty wants us to have in mind the distinction between the unavailability of the noumenal and the present-at-hand nature of the phenomenal. That evening, Rusty convokes twelve of his colleagues to observe and record the new entities. The psychologists discover that the observation goes two ways: the newly visible creatures are also recording and studying the humans. They talk with strange beings, including a green giant who puts the Jolly Green Giant to shame, Lafferty tells us; a fish-faced person; and a frog-faced "Urstuff" person. This last entity turns the anthropological lens back onto the humans, viewing them as absurd chemical constructs: “Oh, you're a chemical species,” a fine-looking, rubbery, frog-faced person said, “just as I myself belong to an Urstuff species, non-molecular and non-all-that-detail. You are not so much creatures right out of mythology as you are creatures right out of a chemistry book. You remind me of some of the cartoon characters in Elementary Basic Chemistry Number One . You yourself, entity Dogstar, are an almost perfect depictment of the protean spirit of Protein as drawn in our elementary texts. You are hinged and articulated just as a protein molecule is.” During all this talk, one of the new persons explains some of their lack of reliance on linear time. We also learn that a new species is added to the community of visibility every aeon. All is documented and rushed to publication in a book by electronic psychologist Dr. Darrel Dogstar. The next day, the psychologists lose their expanded vision, yet millions of people worldwide begin to experience the phenomenon. What is its source? A global computer analysis identifies a specific batch of Sappig-Happig chewing gum as the trigger. This leads to a worldwide shortage and subsequent withdrawal symptoms when new batches fail to create the effect. Investigators question the gum factory flavor-master, John Mastic. Rather than viewing his work as mere industrial chemistry, Mastic describes his craft in terms of divine sub-creation: “I am an artist,” John Mastic told the articled investigators. “When I mix the first batch of a new flavor, I am painting a dawn, I am composing a symphony, I am creating a folk drama, I am bringing up cool deep meanings from the cellar of the soul, I am setting the juice of life to flowing. Each first batch of a new flavor is blended in this one big vat here in the amount of about eighty thousand kilograms.” He details how he made the gum, but he either decides not to tell them or he forgets to tell them that he substituted synthetic corn cobs with cattle feed pellets in the original mixture. That explains the giggling cows from earlier in the story. There is some good news, though. In the earlier encounter with the rest of the persons in the community of visibility, the scientists were treated with “luciferic fluid,” so even if the scientists can’t see the new people now, the new people can still see them. Suddenly, the expanded vision begins manifesting naturally in various animal and insect species across the globe, including cockroaches and moles. The new people said there would be a few bumps during the three days that it takes to transition. Lafferty leaves the story with the giggling moles digging up the McSlims' yard. This is one of those Lafferty stories with many biblical allusions, from the triduum that we see in works such as Fourth Mansions  and “Dig a Crooked Hole,” both of which take place at the "Bug" in Washington, D.C. The entire story echoes creation, giving praise—giggling, which Lafferty figures as a version of joy, drawn from various Psalms such as Psalm 148—and the giggling-cows idea, which comes from cattle in the Books of Job and Isaiah. This cascade of cosmic joy culminates in the story's final moments, illustrating an awakening that bypasses humanity to include the lowest of earthly creatures: Gar-fish are giggling in the lakes. Honker geese are giggling in their skies and in their swamps. Earthworms are giggling in the ground, and squirrels are chortling in the hickory trees. [. . . ] It is a many-fronted chemical advent, a worldwide movement. It has come to the gophers in their tunnels. [. . .] What's that funny noise in the front yard? It's giggling moles tearing up the ground. But they are seeing the ‘Big See’ too. Then there is the gum as communion host. We learn that Mary Imperial misses the experience because she does not understand that the passage into communion is transubtantian, one of the story's themes, along with glorified bodies (the luciferic fluid): But the old tyrant Mary Imperial didn't get all of it. She got only the visual part, and she got that second hand. She should have opened up and lived a little, as Mary Crisis told her. But she missed it by declining the symbol that was more than a symbol." Rather than focus on those aspects of the story, I want to focus on what Lafferty is doing with St. Paul. He draws on one of Paul’s favored words, pleroma , and on its orthodox meaning, in a way that contrasts with what pleroma  becomes in the Gnostic tradition, a contrast Lafferty explores many times elsewhere. Once one has a sense of how Lafferty uses pleroma , one is better positioned to see what the story is doing with its novum: the sensual pleroma. That is where we see Lafferty's genius in fictionalizing metaphysics. One has to see just how weird a “sensual pleroma” is and how hard Lafferty goes at Gnosticism by inventing it. The short version of the history is that  pleroma  enters the Christian tradition through both Pauline and Johannine currents, but it is especially important in the Alexandrian churches, with their interest in Platonizing currents of Hellenistic thought. One first finds it in classical Greek during the fifth and fourth centuries BC. There, it is a non-mystical concept, one just denoting "fullness" or "complement." It is mundane language. Pleroma  is what makes an entity complete; a ship's crew is the ship’s pleroma . Between the third and first centuries BC, the Septuagint expanded this meaning, and it came to refer to cosmic totality. In short, pleroma  was used to translate Hebrew ideas regarding the earth and its total contents, as seen in Psalm 23(24):1. It is worth reading that Psalm if you are reading the story, because Lafferty is drawing on it and playing with the idea that eyes are gates, as well as with what he does with Jacob in two ways in the story. It is probably the appearance of Jacob in the psalm that inspires Lafferty to use his brilliant three variations of Jacob. It’s a detail that is easy to miss, but significant. First, there is Jacob's membrane, an anatomical term referring to the layer of rods and cones in the retina of the eye. It is named after the Irish ophthalmologist Arthur Jacob, who first described it in 1819. There, one finds the microscopic layer of photoreceptor cells located at the back of the eye. Those cells are responsible for capturing light and converting it into electrical signals that the brain processes into visual images. Hence, all the business in the story is about electronics. What happens is that "Jacob" first refers to this anatomical structure; it is the spot in Mary Crisis's eye where her father attaches a microscopic camera probe. Later, Jacob is the biblical Jacob when the psychologist compares the newly visible entities to angels on "Jacob's Ladder." That prompts one of the newly visible people to ask whether she is old enough to have known the historical Jacob personally. The third point is subtle and, unlike the first two references, interpretive. I am convinced it's in the story. That is the relevance of John’s prologue about the Word (the passages where Lafferty gets Ouden ), and then John 1:51, where Jesus tells Nathanael that he is the fulfillment of Jacob’s ladder: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Hereafter ye shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man.” My reading of this story is that Lafferty is doing something so obvious, so in plain sight, that he knows most readers will not have eyes big enough to see it. He’s using two puns. First is the “Big See” as a homophone for “Big C,” as in Christ. Second is the pun in the title on eyes: “Make Sure the Eyes Are Big Enough.” Lafferty goes out of his way to talk about the size of the new person. The next major moment in the history of the  pleroma  comes in the New Testament. By the first century AD, it was used in both concrete, everyday senses—such as leftover basket fillings or a replacement patch for a garment—and in highly theological contexts. In Pauline and deutero-Pauline literature, pleroma  takes on historical and Christological maximalization, or “big eschatology,” representing the "fullness of time," the "full number" in salvation history, and the complete totality of divine presence dwelling in Christ. At the same time, it is quoting Septuagint intertexts to assert God's ownership of creation. During the early second century, Apostolic Fathers like Ignatius of Antioch adapted pleroma . They put it in an ecclesial and devotional context, describing God's fullness as actively blessing and indwelling the Church. I am convinced that Lafferty is drawing on Origen’s use of pleroma  here as well as Paul’s, which is why we read about the aeon. But whatever the truth of that, by the mid-to-late second century, Valentinian Gnostic systems had conceptually reified pleroma  into a spatialized metaphysical world of divine emanations and aeons. That is something we see in Lafferty stories such as “Continued on Next Rock” and “The All At-Once Man.” It is a development that infuriated figures such as Irenaeus, who noted the distinction between what occurred "within" and "outside" this divine place. By the late second and third centuries, Catholic intellectuals—most importantly Origen—had thought through and debated Gnostic exegetes such as Heracleon. Origen’s history in the Church is complicated, as I have written about on the blog, but suffice it to say that orthodox theology was now in a position to clarify or, depending on your view, to police (depending on your view) Pauline usages in contrast to Gnostic technical meanings. In fourth-century and later patristic traditions, pleroma  is an exegetical crux for understanding Catholic ecclesiology. This is especially true in the case of Ephesians 1:23, where the Church is interpreted as the complement that makes Christ the Head and His Body a single living completeness. This is why contemporary biblical scholars are split on whether Ephesians and Colossians are by the historical Paul; they seem to have later and perhaps Johannine-influenced elements. Moving into late antiquity and the medieval period, the pleroma  lost its Wild West quality. The fight was for now. It became the much-domesticated Latin translation plenitudo . That, in turn, preserved the theological concept of fullness. You don’t find pleroma in the scholastic tradition much because the Greek loanword fell out of standard usage. In the twentieth century, pleroma  became a hot topic again through the work of scholars on the Gnostic tradition. It went through a conceptual revival and subsequent academic stabilization. In 1916, Jung used the term in his Seven Sermons to the Dead  and The Red Book . In Jung’s thought, pleroma  is the psychological and mythic symbol of undifferentiated metaphysical totality that exists prior to the appearance of opposites. In 1945, the discovery of the Nag Hammadi library gave scholars direct access to primary Gnostic sources, such as A Valentinian Exposition . That made it possible to understand the term's use as an internal cosmological category structured around decads and dodecads—the decads may be why Lafferty settles on the idea of full creation being ten tenths. That is a lot, so I’ll cut to the point now. In Paul’s writings, he has two very important ways of talking about the pleroma  that one should know in regard to this story. The first is that he says that Christ is the pleroma  of the Godhead because in Christ, the Father becomes visible. The other is that he says the Church is the pleroma  of Christ, or the body of Christ. In my take on this story, the sensual pleroma is the pleroma  of the Church as all of sacramental creation, participating in what Lafferty calls in interviews, stories, and private notes the Adornment of the World. That is why there is so much in this story about participation and participatory language: He did not hear by conventional sound that is often irritating, but by the most wonderful invention ever, sound without noise! And he understood the "talk" of these nations of creatures, though perhaps it should be called ‘communication’ rather than literal "talk." But the most startling observation that they made was that the observing was a two-way street. The "new-appearance persons" were regarding the human psychologists as themselves being new appearances, and they were quite interested in them. "“Oh, it's just a little knock-about model. It is good to see you folks, really good to see you! Every new acquaintance we make enlarges all of us." " . . . we can see and sense you almost as easily as we can see ourselves and persons of the other participating groups . . . And yet we welcome you as a participating species, if you are such." This is Lafferty at his most metaphysically generous, hiding his Christology and expansion view of communion behind giggling cows and giggling cockroaches: "It's circus come to town," "We'll say it's the circus come to town, the Circus," "They had already been giggling for a quite a long while before we began to see the Big Circus," "Generally we are in a horizontal of 'big circle' relationship with each other, and there isn't much ascending or descending to it." That he chooses to make such a positive, affirmative Origenist statement in such a light story is typical of some of his later work. As the new-appearance person lizard says, "Up with the lateral movement! That's what I always say." As I often argue, Lafferty is an esoteric writer who managed to get away with being read as a writer of quirkily stories full of exoteric enjoyment until he didn’t. At that point he became often outwardly esoteric. Then something happened, his last wind. He found a balance that isnt understood yet because one probably has to pass through much of the really esoteric stuff to fall in love with the later novels. Despite its surface fun—giggling cows and chewing gum, which is how it has usually been read so far—this is an esoteric psalm, his most pleromic expression of his maximalist sacramental ontology in its most affirmative form. It is also an exoteric story about just being open to life. A good reminder for us non-gigglers.

Q. 1383. Are the souls in Purgatory sure of their salvation? A.  The souls in Purgatory are sure of their salvation, and they will enter heaven as soon as they are completely purified and made worthy to enjoy that presence of God . . . Q. 1384. Do we know what souls are in Purgatory, and how long they have to remain there? A.  We do not know what souls are in Purgatory nor how long they have to remain there; — Baltimore Catechism , 1885   “But there has never been a day like this before, has there, Ahmad?” called Stuff.      “I am not sure. It may be that such a day comes to everyone, and that each of your ancestors has known one. Or it may be that this is the only day like it that has ever been. To me also it has been an especially vivid day.”     They did not understand what he said, for he spoke in deep Malay, not the pidgin that only strings a few of the words in. Yet they knew what he said well enough. Advanced Lafferty today. “Task Force Fifty-Eight and One Half” is early but ambitious. Like “The Ugly Sea,” "The Wagons," and a few other stories from the first years of Lafferty’s return to writing, it shows him working on the literary side of the market. As far as I know, it has been written about twice. Heywood Reynolds wrote a brief appreciation piece in the second volume of Feast of Laughter , speculating about Lafferty’s experience in the Pacific Theater and how it relates to details in the story. Ironically, the piece appears in the “You’re On the Right Track, Kid” section. The irony bubbles because Reynolds writes that Lafferty “refers to ‘Elias the Syrian from Oklahoma,’” and then glosses Syrian  as “Phoenicians were seafarers,” adding “Later he [Lafferty] describes himself: ‘One was an apostate seminarian.’” Apostate has a meaning, and Lafferty was not that. That failed seminarian is not Lafferty but Joseph Stalin, just as the “stone-mason, son of a blacksmith” is Benito Mussolini; and the “poster-painter, son of a customs official” is Adolf Hitler; and the “dilettante, son of a dilettante” is Hirohito, who was an amateur marine biologist interested in small marine predators. This whole great-man fantasy, with the Axis leaders playing the role of great men in one character's imagination, needs to be caught to understand the story. The other interpretation is by Andrew Ferguson, who is, of course, good on the hard biographical and bibliographical details. After the summary, I will focus on where my reading diverges from his and relate those divergences to the Argo Legend , an interpretive choice Ferguson also makes. This time, Lafferty gives us a story set in the final days of WWII. On July 4, 1945, four soldiers, Joe “Stuff” Stoffel, George Elias, Phil Plunkett, and Calzatoio (nicknamed Shoe-Horn), are on liberty. They take a rubber boat, jokingly named Task Force Fifty-Eight and One Half , to the island of Ita Pulau in the Moluccas. During the journey, the young men discuss big topics, including their desire to control their own fates. Stuff talks about his specific ambition to have “the world by the tail.” Lafferty’s narrator then gives a brief, brilliant lesson in Malay vocabulary, defining terms like ba-goose (good) and tiddy ba-goose (bad). Once one knows this, one has mastered most of what one needs to know, but Lafferty pushes the joke further, teaching the reader how to count in Malay. This lesson is both out of order and incomplete. From the start, we are told that communication matters, a point that will return in a speech given in Malay. The introduction ends with the four men rowing through waters that appear increasingly deep and concave, almost mystically green. The story contains some of Lafferty’s most poetically intense mythogenic writing, delivered comparatively straight. Then the men arrive at the island to meet a local man named Ahmad. Lafferty suggests that Ita Pulau is a paradise. The group shares a meal of fish and taro with Ahmad. They drink a large quantity of a beverage called coconut wine. Under its influence, which takes on the nimbus of myth, the soldiers enter a state of mental clarity and heightened sensory perception. They feel as though they have awakened from a lifelong dream into total wakefulness. A philosophical discussion follows about luck, religion, and the nature of success. The legend of Faust comes up, as does the question of what it means to be graced enough to hold the entire world in one’s hands. Then an important moment arrives, as Ahmad warns them that they have had enough to drink. He urges them to row back to their base before the tide becomes too strong. Off go the four men in the Task Force Fifty-Eight and One Half , rowing back to their stations. At first they feel like giants. They possess immense power. Then something unexpected happens. As they approach the shore, they experience a kind of collective failure that points to their deep flaws. One is incapacitated. Shoe-Horn throws the oars into the sea and starts a fistfight with Elias. Stuff falls into a spiritual paralysis. Lafferty says they died. Then Lafferty says they did not, because he gives us a second ending. The men wake up in a muddy swamp, where a local boy they disliked says he rescued them by hauling them ashore and kicking the water out of their stomachs. This is likened to waking up in purgatory. The story ends with the group walking back to their unit along a rough jeep road called the “World Famous Dixie Highway,” followed by the narrator’s observation that the world has been in decline since that perfect afternoon. There is a lot to say about this story. Ferguson’s reading is provocative, so I am going to build on it by marking points of disagreement, not because anyone cares about disagreement in itself, but because I think it matters for a richer reading of Lafferty. He interprets “Task Force Fifty-Eight and a Half” as a philosophical microcosm of the world and the Church, using a mundane World War II raft trip to prototype Lafferty’s techniques, many of which are already apparent here, and his theological themes. So far, so good. He argues that the characters’ drinking of local coconut wine grants them a fleeting, omniscient “writer’s perspective” and a perfect “high afternoon,” and he points out that this absolute clarity carries the cost of realizing their impending end. The “writer’s perspective” point looks to me like Ferguson’s hobbyhorse of reducing the metaphysical to the metafictional. He does not see, or he chooses not to address, the sacramental aspect of the wine. He notes that the story presents two outcomes: a literal death by drowning, and a purgatorial survival in a “shadow-world.” Ferguson writes: "But the loss of what they had is unbearable: a death more devastating than drowning could be: 'the loss, the ineffable sense of loss that comes to the souls of the partially damned; to those who had lived in the real world for a high afternoon, and know that they can never have it again.'" There are also minor but important errors. Ferguson writes that Plunkett and Elias fight until the raft capsizes. In fact, Shoe-Horn and Elias are the ones fighting. Plunkett sings slobberingly, and Stuff does manage to paddle weakly (he isn't incapacitated in the water; his spiritual incapitation precedes this). If I am right that the story is a character study in spiritual failure, this confusion matters because we need to map what happens in the raft onto the speeches. There are three main areas where I disagree, and each works at a different interpretive level. First is the question of pessimism and hope in Lafferty’s long arc of development, a disagreement at the level of macro-reading. Second is the allegorical and religious dimension, which I think is elided, missed, or misunderstood. This seems to me a recurring weakness in Ferguson’s view of Lafferty, and it requires close reading and attention to particulars. Third is the story’s relation to the Argo Legend, a question shaped by both the macro-reading and the close reading. When the close reading is flawed, and when the macro-reading is sweetened and secularized, the result is misleading. Ferguson writes: And yet it’s these same tics that mark this as an early Lafferty, despite the late publication date: the sentiment that “the world has been going downhill since [those] ancient days” has little place in his most mature work, when despite his own personal pains and bouts of despair, his faith remained firm that the world would be reborn, would exist again, and that it would not be downhill—or worse, unendingly flat—forever. While it’s true that the world changed, it need not always be a shadow-world; there will again be high afternoons, and some boats will eventually make it safe to shore. I’ll show my cards. I hate this putting pantyhose, nylon, Saran Wrap, hairspray, or Vaseline on a camera lens to get a dreamy effect. I see two propositions: This passage shows “early Lafferty” traits (notably the “everything’s been going downhill since ancient days” sentiment), and that pessimistic note doesn’t fit his most mature work, where his faith stayed firm despite suffering. The world’s decline/change isn’t final: even if it has become a “shadow-world,” it won’t remain that way forever—the world will be reborn, “high afternoons” will return, and “some boats” will make it safely to shore. There is a great deal here that I agree with, so I am going to try to be careful. What I dislike is how summative it is. I will say I also find it presumptuous to assume that Lafferty's faith wasn't firm in his middle age (he said he only broke a little in his twenties), but that his faith was somehow stronger later. His faith no doubt deepened, but this looks to me like biographical simplification and literary journalism or bad literary criticism. By the end of this post, you should understand why, even if you disagree. In reverse order, starting with 2. This statement gets the story wrong because it doesn't recognize the tropological role of Purgatory in it. It is certainly correct that Lafferty never gives up grace and eschatology, but it reads both in a way that makes the shape of the story ungraspable. I will come to this in a moment. More important for understanding Lafferty as a whole is the first proposition, so a few words about it. I do not believe that Lafferty becomes more hopeful and less pessimistic as he goes along. My view is that Lafferty was culturally pessimistic about the state of the West from the beginning, but he always paired that pessimism with a deep love of fun and eschatological hope. He was, in this sense, a Catholic accelerationist who threw himself into apocalypse and rejected utopianism. Throughout, one finds Lafferty being both pessimistic and optimistic in ways that interlock with his sense that the world has gone to hell and with his desire for apocalypse. For instance, late works such as Serpent’s Egg , Sindbad: The 13th Voyage , and East of Laughter  have black strains of pessimism, alongside the spaces that keep eschatological promise open. That is obviously a major difference in how one reads Lafferty. It is connected to Ferguson’s view that Lafferty becomes someone who encourages us to make our own worlds, a claim he gives a utopian inflection. I read Lafferty as saying that utopia is a disaster, and that the utopian impulse is dangerous, but when you are stuck in no-place, what are you to do? Oddly, I probably also see the story as more hopeful than Ferguson does, because I take the Purgatory coda seriously and read it as being about suffering and hope. After all, the two endings of the story are underlined: either men die and go to hell, which is the hopeless first ending, or that the men undergo some other kind of death, real or spiritual, and pass through a purgatory. Lafferty writes, “There are two ways of looking at it, but one doesn’t amount to much.” In the first ending, they are done as persons. In the second, they wash up on shore, a very long and painful path ahead of them, the Dixie Road being a serious joke in the story. Second, I think if one wants to understand the story, one needs to see that the actions on the raft that get the men killed are tightly tied to their speeches in the story, with each action being a metacommentary on the personal characters of the men. They are young men, which is what lends the story its tragic coloring, though it is hard to ever read Lafferty as writing tragedy since his view of the world is metaphysically comic. What does that mean in regard to the four men? Let’s take a look at each one in turn, stepping back to consider how the story allegorizes human choice and character. Joe “Stuff” Stoffel’s failure is spiritual pride at an extreme pitch. Throughout, he is a portrait of superbia  pushed to parodic heights. He assumes a kind of immanent salvation for himself, because he thinks he is a great man who will be lifted by fate. Either God chose him, or he will make a deal with the Devil. If the experience on Ita Pulau is anything, it is an experience of the sacramentality of creation, the full presence of the world in its shining wonder. It is as if the men, for one afternoon, see creation in all its graced goodness. Stuff looks at that perfect afternoon and treats it as a commodity to bottle and control. He says he will package and sell the coconut wine: “I will bottle the stuff,” said Stuff, “and then I’ll really have the world by the tail. It doesn’t make you drunk, it just hones you to a fine edge, and it brings all the rest of the world up to your high level. It is the greatest thing ever.” To make the point unmistakable, Lafferty frames Stoffel as someone who would seize Faustian temptation. The men and Ahmad talk about Faust and the Faust tradition: "They didn't do what they had the opportunity to do in the years that they had. But give me twenty years of the power and I will make such connections in all three of the worlds that they can't put me in hell.” Now take George Elias whose character defining moment is the following: "‘I'll gamble it,’ I said. ‘You've all made me mad now.’ I told God and all the rest of them that they had done wrong to try and panic me, and that I wouldn't go back to the sacraments till I was back from the war and away from those dangers . . . ‘But after this is over we will figure it out unemotionally,’ I said. ‘We will see.’" Although Elias possesses some of the virtues of self-honesty and prudence (he at least knows it is time to leave the island), his reliance on grace on his own scheduled terms is the stuff of damnation. His descent into a violent, empty-eyed fistfight on the raft illustrates the theological warning that pride is no substitute for formed virtue. If he goes to hell at the end of section one, it is a classic case of delayed contrition. We now come to a part of Ferguson's interpretation that, to me, looks like he is so interested in the biographical and bibliographic elements that he lost track of what is on the page. He calls Calzatoio “Shoe-Horn” a “genial Italian.” What is genial about Shoe-Horn? He mockingly butchers the host's name and ignores Ahmad's fable of eggs to aggressively demand women. The fable is about hiding the girls of the island from men such as Shoe-Horn: “Where are the girls?” asked Shoe-Horn. “One day a cuscus (the coconut possum) came to visit the turtle,” said Ahmad. “‘Where are your eggs?’ asked the cuscus. ‘I love to look at turtle eggs, so round and soft to the touch.’ ‘Up on the hill,’ said the turtle. But they were not up on the hill; the cuscus could not find them, and he came back. ‘Where are your eggs?’ he asked again. ‘I have an affection for them. I always did like children in whatever form.’ ‘Up in the top of the kapok tree,’ said the turtle, but the cuscus could not find them there. ‘Where are your eggs?’ he asked again. ‘They are so leathery and smooth that I like to pet them.’ ‘Perhaps their mother has taken them to the other side of the island on the rocks,’ said the turtle. The cuscus went to look, but he didn't find them there either. This was because the turtle had lied, and the eggs were buried in the sand all the time. He knew in what way the cuscus liked turtle eggs.” “Oh, I never heard that story before,” said Shoe-Horn. “But where are the girls?” Shoe-Horn cruelly taunts Phil, saying that Phil’s fiancée is probably shacked up and cheating on him. He becomes the fatalistic jinx for the group (the allusion to the molasses jar in Uncle Remus is to a child named Babe who tips the jar over just out of sheer high spirits). He is a man who won’t listen to Ahmad’s wisdom about knowing when to say enough is sufficient. He almost has to be forced to leave the island, and then dooms the other men by giggling and throwing their oars into the ocean. He picks the bloody fistfight with Elias through his molasses-jar action with the oars, and their raft drifts into the dangerous dark of the ocean. He whines that he would rather lie in the mud and drown than make the arduous walk back to base in the second ending, which means that even then, he does not see that the characters have been spared and graced to suffer in Purgatory. He is a colossal failure of intemperance and an unformed will. Congenial he is not. Finally, there is the pathetic Australian Phil Plunkett. His failure illustrates the limits of natural virtue. In the end, he just checks out mentally, becoming a slobbering, singing idiot at the bottom of the raft. On the one hand, Plunkett seems to have a genuine humility, and he seems to have a deep, anchoring love for his fiancée, Aileen; but that is also his limitation. His mental image of Aileen is his primary moral orientation toward goodness. Note how he talks about her as being the meaning of everything. He is a shallow fool of a man, and Lafferty goes to great lengths to make it easy for the reader to see this. Plunkett does not resort to active malice, but in the end, he does not have perseverance. At this point, it should be clear that the four men are deeply flawed, unlikable, sad characters, but they are also young, and perhaps their callowness can be redeemed. One way to read the story is that one has one perfect day, and all of life afterward is a letdown. This is where Ferguson’s reading ends. Another, stronger reading is that the men who had the perfect afternoon were unworthy of it, full of ingratitude, and not oriented to the experience. One of the most interesting ways of misreading the story as a result of the fist kind of reading is not to recognize the boy at the end, hated by everyone, as an early instance of counterfiguration. For a Roman Catholic, to wake up in Purgatory is welcome news: one has been saved, even though one will suffer. The boy is like an angel giving the men that news. They will be saved, but they will have to take a very long road before they can appreciate what the afternoon meant, something like the gift of experiencing the sacramental order. As the story notes of this shadow-world: "It wasn't just the terrible pain and nausea of entry into it; that would disappear in two or three days . . . It was the loss, the ineffable sense of loss that comes to the souls of the partially damned; to those who had lived in the real world for a high afternoon, and know that they can never have it again." If you read the second ending as depressing, I think you have fallen into a literary trap. You have read the story from the viewpoint of the men of  Task Force Fifty-Eight and One Half  in hell or at the beginning of their pugatorial journey, still unappreciative of how close they came to damnation. It would be as if one sees the afternoon as an ungrateful man sees it, bitter because he once received a great gift and did not receive two great gifts. That is the point of Ahmad’s speech to the men, delivered in his own language, and it is why Lafferty opens the story with the lesson in Malay. In other words, you must learn to speak this language of grace if you want to understand what matters. The opening is not just a cute scene about (good) “Ba-Goose” and “Tiddy Ba-Goose” (bad) and counting. This should be obvious when the disliked boy at the end says “Tiddy Ba-Goose” to the men: One sees one's three friends similarly dead and beslimed, and standing above to torture and mock is a particularly disliked Malay boy. “Tiddy ba-goose,” he says with all the contempt and disapprobation that can possibly be expressed. He is the worst one of the lot. They shouldn't allow him even in hell. He is a thief and has been kicked out of every battery area on the island. “Just where in hell are we?” asked Stuff, “or have I answered my own question?” “Even a lizard can find his own hole,” said the boy. “Maybe you a little bit lower.” “How did we get to this shore?” “Oh, I haul you in. Might not have been a very good idea.” We are hearing Lafferty, or something axiologically identical with him. Have you learned enough Malay to get by? Can you correctly say “Ba-Goose” and “Tiddy Ba-Goose”? Something like that question is being posed to the reader. The third point I will keep brief. It reaches into the larger story Ferguson tells about Lafferty, and into his sense of a utopian potential in Lafferty’s invitation to create new worlds, as if one could do so while cleaving off the intensity of Lafferty’s religious views. It is a bit like wanting the Jefferson Bible instead of the actual New Testament. My view is that you do not get to keep Lafferty without the “craziness” of St. John, and that you end up with a much less interesting Lafferty if you try. Spiritual war, not just culture-making, is at the center of Lafferty’s project, and that is why he should make us uncomfortable. For this reason, Ferguson hears too much of “the DMV is purgatory,” and not enough of the prayer for the dead in Purgatory: “Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis. Requiescant in pace. Amen,” which Lafferty would have prayed many, many times. Because Ferguson does not look for the story’s built-in Catholic meaning and instead makes it psychological, he misses Lafferty’s irony. The partially damned are the entirely saved, and this is preferable to the entirely damned. In the story, the entirely damned are those who drown and are damned, and that fate follows from a failure to cooperate with the gift of graced vision, that "sparkle" from the cononut wine that even made better (perfected) Shoe-Horn ("he was changed for the better as they all were, and he had a new sparkle to him"). Ferguson writes, And what seems as though it happened was, they got rescued by a contemptuous Malay boy, and had to trudge back to base battling screaming hangovers and still coughing seawater out of their lungs. But the loss of what they had is unbearable: a death more devastating than drowning could be : “the loss, the ineffable sense of loss that comes to the souls of the partially damned; to those who had lived in the real world for a high afternoon, and know that they can never have it again.” No, damnation after having participated in sacramentality is worse. It is far more devastating, and drowning in the story is not about drowning being biological death. That is why Lafferty gives us the second happy ending, which is happy because Catholicism has a hard view of suffering that it is only through suffering that one can move toward the Cross, which means those who end up in Purgatory do so through partial sanctification. A full reading would need to weigh this against waking up in a Purgatorial condition, with the metaphysical being balanced against the psychological. Finally, Ferguson reads the Task Force Fifty-Eight and One Half raft as a version of the Argo, the figure of the Catholic Church as a pilgrim church in Lafferty's Argo Legend. The Argo does take many forms, and we know from Archipelago  that it can be as small as a canoe. Even so, I am persuaded only in a narrow sense: the Church is the channel of extravagant grace, and there is a boat in this story. Part of the Church is the Church Suffering in Purgatory. But to be fully convinced, I would need a much stronger reading of the story’s particulars. Ferguson sees the Task Force as “every inch an Argo .” I do not. To me, the Task Force sits in the Argo ’s shadow. The figure of the Church in the story is the disapproving Malay boy. The raft is what you get when you try to ride it out on liberty while not being aboard the Argo . You might as well throw your oars into the sea, not bother to fire your flare gun, and wait for the killing waves. Count yourself lucky, Lafferty seems to say, if someone hauls your ass back to shore and stomps the water out of your lungs.

And he said unto him, If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead. “We won't be taken in by that, Mr. Sheen,” Hector O'Day said. “We're too smart for that.” “So was the little boy who got pulled all the way down to Hell nine years ago,” Anselm Sheen said. “He was a really smart boy. He reminds me of you, Hector.” Jack of diamonds, Jack of Diamonds, I’ve known you of old / You’ve robbed my poor pockets of silver and gold. Ghosts are everywhere in Lafferty’s fiction, from the first stories he wrote to the last. They can be gaseous breath-spirits, possessing spirits (diabolical or not, as in the case of his poltergeists), eidolons and splinters, pseudo-organic revenant bodies, speed ghosts and other perceptual artifacts, constructions, animals and omens, psychic-weather ghosts, social-ecology ghosts, rhetorical ghosts applied to living people, schizo-gashes on different planes of fictional reality, and, finally, misclassifications. That nonce list could easily be expanded. It is no surprise that one will learn an awful lot about how to imagine spectrality in the Ghost Story . One of Lafferty's best stories is one of his earliest, “ Ghost in the Corn Crib .” On one level, it is a just a very fine ghost story. In a better world, it would be an anthology staple. It is told with Lafferty’s best humor. On another, it announces that in Lafferty the ghost will always be as much an epistemic problem as a paranormal entertainment. That goes back to Daniel Dafoe’s “ A True Relation of the Apparition of Mrs. Vea l,” which wrote the first playbook for this kind of tale. “Ghost in the Corn Crib” dramatizes the construction of the ghost story, raises questions about epistemic authority, and uses a third-person focalization that is playfully elbow-to-the-ribs. “Gray Ghost: A Reminiscence” is one of Lafferty’s fully mature stories, told in the first person by his "Men Who Knew Everything" stand-in, the man who did not know everything, Laff, who arguably has a ghostly history, himself being a secondary person (see “Mud Violet” and infer the question Laff wants to ask Mary Mondo). “Gray Ghost” plays a different kind of epistemic game and is remarkably sophisticated. The story trains the reader not to be taken in by a con, then makes the con nearly irresistible, and ends with an apocalyptic image that points to how the con prefigures the kind of typological pattern-thinking and eschatological presentism that inspire so much of Lafferty. After a summary of the plot, I’ll explain a little about how I think that works. On Halloween night in 1924, Anselm Sheen, whom readers will learn more about when In a Green Tree is finally published, drives his son Barnaby and three other ten-year-old boys—Hector O'Day (Harry O’Donovan), Grover Whelk (George Drakos), and the narrator, Laff—to Electric Park, a dog-racing track south of Tulsa. Anselm gives the boys a choice. They can watch the races or explore the nearby Holy Ghost Burial Ground, but he warns them of a dangerous spot called the "Devil's Handshake." As if a magnet has pulled them, the boys discover a group of older children using a tunnel system to prank a younger boy. The younger boy, a potential initiate, is told he has to stick his hand into the sinkhole. An older boy inside the sinkhole (for the last three years, the role has been played by Dirty Dugan) pretends to be the devil and grabs the younger boy, pulling him into the sand. As the main characters approach the sinkhole, they hear older boys laughing and a younger boy screaming. Hector O'Day intervenes by shouting into the tunnel entrance. Out comes twelve-year-old Dirty Dugan, who had been playing the role of the devil. Dugan joins the group, and they all make their way to the cemetery caretaker, Amos Centenary Black, to witness a supernatural ritual. Amos, who claims to be a descendant of Napoleon and is clearly a man who tells a great story, leads the boys to a monument to perform his annual ritual of waking Captain John Diehard. We learn that the Captain was a Confederate soldier buried since 1899. Using a pipe that extends from the monument into the grave, Amos lowers a snifter of Royal Hanover Brandy. It rouses the dead Captain. The story then becomes a conversation between the boys and the ghost. The boys each reach a hand down the pipe to shake the Captain’s skeletal hand. At the same time, the Captain discusses his military history, his prophetic visions of a future skeletal Confederate uprising (“the South shall rise again”), and the bets Amos has placed on his behalf at Electric Park: “The way I envision things,” said dead man John Diehard, waking up (well, the return from the dead is a very spotty and broken thing), “is that about ten thousand of us great leaders of the Confederacy shall all rise from our graves at the same time. For best effects we should not be fleshed but should rise in our skeleton bones only; and yet we will be lively and completely competent skeletons. Coming so, we will send a wave of fear through all our enemies. On our rising we will raise our great voices like ten thousand powerful doomsday trumpets, and the entire South will rise with us.” He tells the boys about his ghost dog, named after himself, Gray Ghost, whom he says is in the grave with him but will soon leave to run in the night's fifth race. To pass the time, the Captain challenges the boys to a game of dice using a pair he whittled from his own ankle bones. The Captain wins against the boys, each losing to the Captain except for Grover Whelk, who wins and is handed a faded Confederate one-dollar bill through the pipe. After Dirty Dugan leaves because he cannot pay his debt, an astonishing lightning strike turns the entire landscape, including Electric Park, into a photographic negative. This fulfills the Captain’s promise of a supernatural sign made to the skeptical boy of the group, Hector O’Day. After the flash, the dog Gray Ghost appears at the monument wearing a winner's ribbon, somehow dry in the pouring rain, before vanishing back into the grave. The boys meet up with Anselm Sheen and drive home through a heavy rainstorm, singing songs, and hear the other supernatural promise fulfilled: the distant sound of the "Resurrection Reveille" being played on a bugle from the cemetery. Perhaps the first thing to note about this story is that it performs an act of historical recovery, bringing back Lafferty’s childhood while also raising the question of whether one can ever return to it. In this way, it belongs to his anti-amnesia work, and it further develops his insistence that one should honor the magic of memory rather than rationalize it away under the auspices of adult vision. There is a great deal of real historical detail in the story, with Tulsa being the second major city to have a greyhound track (the first was in California), which sparked the Southern fad for greyhound racing. Electric Park itself shuttered in the late 1920s and became another kind of Tulsa playground called Crystal Amusement Park. There is the Overland touring car, an image powerful enough in itself to call up a lost world. And there is the legend of John Singleton Mosby (1833-1916) behind the whole Confederate Captain encounter: Mosby, the real “Gray Ghost,” so called for his tactical stealth. It is true that the poor in 1920s Tulsa sometimes lived on what were then called shanty boats. Then there is the all but lost tradition of Confederate ghost stories that had their last big hurrah in weird western and weird war comics in the 1960s and 1970s. These all contribute to a just-under-the-surface melancholy and an on-the-surface nostalgia, though I think it is a mistake to call the story a Ray Bradbury story, as one very smart Lafferty reader has claimed. What it does with narrative structure is far closer to the Lafferty we know than to anything in Bradbury. Unlike a simple memory machine that brings back boyhood, the story is tightly constructed to suspend the reader between staged trickery and supernatural phenomena. Take Anselm Sheen, our authority figure. He starts the story as a gatekeeper who offers the boys a choice between paid dog races and free ghosts, but he tells them what he would do if he were younger. He would be brave. This forked choice given to the boys is set against a credibility anchor in the form of Electric Park, a realism payload of local Tulsa geography, which Lafferty (or Laff) adds weight to by adding details about Peoria Road, the Arkansas River, the track’s electric rabbit, and a specific 1925 grandstand mishap. Our story takes place on Halloween night, 1924—a time culturally coded for hoaxes and tricks—so Lafferty knows what he is doing by establishing a baseline of trust before moving the boys a mere quarter mile south. All this proximity ensures the boys never really leave the safety of civilization's lights and sounds. They are in the shadow-zone where the holy (the Holy Ghost Burial Ground) and the diabolical (the Devil’s Handshake) intersect. That spiritual topography is a microcosm of a spiritually vertical world that does not exist in Ray Bradbury, who, in my view, is interested in wonders that break into the world of experience from marginalized but imaginatively horizontal spaces. Like almost every Lafferty story, this one is here to condition you as a reader. There are, by my count, at least three important structural switches. The first exists to get the reader to be suspicious of supernatural claims by confirming a mechanical hoax. At the Devil’s Handshake, Lafferty takes the time to walk us through the older boys’ blueprint for scaring the younger boys: you take a natural sinkhole connected to a riverbank cliff, then you tunnel into it and install a hidden participant who deceives the younger boy. Now, the mechanism by which the Devil grabs a little boy by the hand and pulls him all the way down to Hell is this: Devil's Handshake Dune is only twenty feet from where the riverbank drops suddenly down to the verge of the river. The point of the drop is the face of a cliff about twelve feet high. Into the face of this cliff, boys have been digging tunnels and caves for years. And one of those tunnels, a meander of more than twenty feet through the sandy dark, reaches right to the middle of Devil's Handshake Dune. The skeptical Hector O’Day ("in the light of day") is the boy who wants to see through deception. It is he who identifies the devil as Dirty Dugan, a fraud who has played the role for years. So what has Lafferty done? He has shown the reader how terrain and social pressure can be used to manipulate children, which primes the reader to apply this learned skepticism to the story’s second half. Dugan also functions as a kind of control variable, later tied back into the supernatural ambiguity when the Confederate Captain tells him he “owes a trick” because he cannot pay. Does this mean that the Confederate Captain is just another trick? Now take the second episode at the Holy Ghost Burial Ground. Lafferty introduces a second complication: it looks as if we get a glimpse of all the hoax-enabling hardware, managed by a myth-making ritual director. Amos Centenary Black, the cemetery caretaker who claims extravagantly mixed heritage and descent from Napoleon, is in control of the setting and the props, including the lantern, a basket full of odd things, and the key. Amos initiates the ritual by pouring brandy, which “wakes” Captain John Diehard. And here is a very Lafferty touch. Lafferty ties Amos to the Captain with a symmetrical legend, biography, and epitaph: born January 1, 1800; died December 31, 1899; promised to return. What is Amos’s middle name? Centenary. The iron pipe and its locking cap are a plausible conduit for voices, a skeletal hand, bone dice, and the exchange of money, including the faded Confederate one-dollar bill given to Grover Whelk. These are the sorts of “souvenir proof” that are entirely feasible as planted props Here, Lafferty introduces his third complication: his fascination with memory. Despite what might be hoaxed hardware, in the theater of memory, we have a phenomenon that goes beyond simple stagecraft. Hector O’Day wants that testable sign to verify the encounter, so we get the lightning. Following the lightning strike, the dog Gray Ghost appears. Laff tells us that the dog is entirely dry despite the heavy rain and vanishes directly through the solid stone of the monument. All this is unlike the tunnel or the physical conduit of the pipe. It sure looks like a genuine supernatural payload, which counterbalances the hoax hypothesis. Unsurprisingly, there will be no resolution of this ambiguity between the real and the tricked. If we want to undercut impossible events, Lafferty gives us a built-in epistemological escape hatch via the consumption of the graveyard cider. Anselm Sheen retroactively knocks the legs out from under the boys' testimony by diagnosing them as having a snootful. Old Amos got them drunk and took their money. By introducing alcohol as a rationalizer for their heightened emotions, distorted memories, and visions of "winged spirits," Lafferty gives the reader one half of a rationalized ghost story. But then the story concludes with the boys hearing the "Resurrection Reveille" played on a wasp-filled bugle from four miles away. The angry wasps in the mouthpiece of the trumpet become the angels of the resurrection. Patent for the electric rabbit Or they don't, and the boys have been like the greyhounds at Electric Park tricked into chasing an electric rabbit, the following two passages cross-pressuring each other: There are a lot of people who don't even remember the old Electric Park that was south of Tulsa, between the Peoria Road and the Arkansas River. It was the dog-racing track complete with electric rabbit. Then there was a lightning flash that you wouldn’t believe. The lights of Electric Park shone black for a momentas though they were a negative of the lightning. The runt apple trees stood out like X-ray pictures of themselves in that lightning. The thunderclap was instantaneous and earth-shaking, and sudden rain could be heard in the near distance. Then everything was wet — well, everything was wet except the dog Gray Ghost. He had appeared suddenly, with a winner's blue ribbon around his neck, and dry as a bone. He yipped a hello. Then he disappeared right down through the stone top of the monument and yipped another hello to dead man Captain John Diehard there below. The four of us boys ran hard for Electric Park through the banging rain. In thinking about where this leaves the reader, I kept thinking about the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. One of the ideas of his that has never stopped fascinating me can be found in what I take to be his greatest work, Philosophical Fragments and Concluding Unscientific Postscript . He writes that it would be harder to believe in Christ’s resurrection had one met him at Emmaus or known him during his ministry. No amount of historical knowledge can bring you into close enough proximity to the divinely incarnational. Faith was harder for the first-century man who met Christ firsthand. That is also the bloodstream of Chestertonian paradox. In a difficult passage, Kierkegaard writes: Faith is the objective uncertainty with the repulsion of the absurd, held fast in the passion of inwardness, which is the relation of inwardness intensified to its highest . . . Faith must not be satisfied with incomprehensibility, because the very relation to or repulsion from the incomprehensible, the absurd, is the expression for the passion of faith. That is faith as a dialectical moment. It means something like faith is committing yourself passionately to something you can’t prove objectively, even though it can seem absurd. Faith isn’t a calm acceptance of ‘it’s mysterious’; it is the very intense, lived tension of being confronted by the incomprehensible/absurd and still choosing to hold on. As a Thomisically minded Roman Catholic with a Jesuit formation, I’d want to qualify this Tertullian-like view of reason and faith, but let’s work with it a bit, first, because it is so relevant to the story and, second, because it is a consistent area where Lafferty isn’t Thomistic but stays true to his Augustinian formation. This plays out on four levels. First, there is bare living witness of the miraculous. As Amos Centenary Black says, “Ah, but I will have five highly intelligent witnesses present this night . . . I'll have Hector, Barnaby, Grover, Laff, and you, Dirty Dugan. If people will not believe you five, as Scripture says, neither will they believe one risen from the dead.” Then we have what Lafferty is blowing a raspberry at and using for a serious purpose: Is the South riz? Then there is the resurrection of the body, which is the Apostle's Creed, said in the Catholic Mass: I believe in one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church. I confess one Baptism for the forgiveness of sins and I look forward to the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. Amen. Finally, there is mnemonic resurrection, the recollection of the members of memory, for Lafferty has played one of his best etymological games with the story's subtitle. He knows full well that reminiscence came into Latin from a Greek loan: anamnesis . And as Lafferty fans know, “Anamnesis” would be what he thought of as his final story and one of his skeleton keys. I’ll wrap up with something else that could be explained in more detail, but this is already getting too long. That is the verses at the end. Lafferty’s verses might be doggerel , but it is a mistake for a reader not to think them through. The four concluding song snippets are like a checksum. They all point back to the story’s themes—bodies, gambling, money, and alcohol—and they pull together, at the very end, into a centripetal package all the story’s epistemological ambiguity. The first verse about dismembered men is about partial evidence: “We saw a man without a foot, and one without a head, And one without no legs at all, and all of them were dead.” The second verse modifies the traditional "Jack of Diamonds" folk songs, which are often about gambling (booze and losing money), with imagery of mud and bloody aces, the best known version being about alcohol and a Conderdate soldier: “ Jack of Diamonds, Jack of Diamonds , your real name is mud! In your hand are four aces, all covered with blood.” And so forth. Finally, in the narrator Laff’s imagination, the four sets of verses become linked to the "winged spirits" that supply the songs' missed beats, a detail subsequently made anagogical by the wasps blown through the Captain’s Resurrection Reveille bugle: Then we heard it, loud and total, the “Resurrection Reveille” with the hottest licks this side of Hell. We should never have doubted that dead man Captain Diehard would get off that bugle song for us. And we knew that he hadn't bothered to clean that wasp nest out of his bugle. He was blowing right through those angry wasps: they were the dozen enraptured (were they mad, boy!) winged spirits. We heard that bugle from four miles away. These are Hot Licks, another instance of Lafferty using counterfiguration. These hot licks are not the flames of fire burning a boy who has been dragged to hell, but the feeling of good cider warmth of those who have heard the waspy stingy Seraphim (“the burning ones”) in the background. For those interested, here is where it started, from a page of Lafferty's handwritten first draft. Note the Easter egg that the original Amos carved headstones, which explains the centenary dates and middle name, Centenary:

“Looking at the Japanese from the outside (as I must) it seems that one of your finest literary entertainments and pleasures is the ‘Ghost Story’. And the essence of the Ghost Story is the juxtaposition of horror and fun, or reality and dream state, of the familiar suddenly gone strange and weird, of the loved and cherished suddenly turned frightening, and of the comic standing up like a giant among the various realities and rationalities.” “I seldom write ‘ghost stories’ per se, but I do constantly try to deal in ‘joyful entertainments’: A thing can be at the same time a ‘joyful entertainment’ and an allegory and an archetype, and sometimes accidentally a ‘ghost story’. The most subtle ‘ghost story’ is the discovering of a ghost inside oneself, which is the essence of the ‘double blood’ experiences.” — Letter, 1993 Despite its title, the unpublished prenucleation story “Get Off the World” is not science fiction, but a rationalized ghost story and an early foray into noir. James Francis Battleby is a simple man who needs to disappear, and fast. He has just discovered that his employer has crossed the line into some unspecified but perfidious criminality. The problem is that he has only nine thousand dollars in savings, while the three powerful men involved, Thomas Cromwell Crawley, Melvin Masterman, and Hugo Erpresser, not only want him dead but also have the resources and connections to arrange it. Battleby first goes to a disappearer and locator, who turns down the sum. He then goes to Wreckville for the help of Willy McGilly. McGilly lays out the reality of the situation: "Then to me also your case seems to have no solution. There are six possible courses, flight, disguise, diversion, appeasement, attack, death. The first and last are nearly automatic; you run till you are caught and when you are caught you die. Disguises have endless variations and only one thing in common: none of them will work." From here, the story becomes a series of weird-menace pranks that scare the antagonists. McGilly stages a fake suicide using a substitute body provided by his morgue worker nephew. While thugs are looking for Battleby, a shotgun blast is heard in an alley. The body is discovered with its face blown off (one assumes McGilly pulled the trigger) and is sent to the funeral home to be buried. Crawley, Masterman, and Erpresser attend the funeral. Erpresser has doubts about the positive identification of the corpse. Following the funeral, the pranks begin. McGilly is going to psychologically torment them, not that they don’t have it coming. Erpresser goes back to his room in a ritzy high-rise and finds a life-like rubber replica of Battleby's face, and Masterman finds artificial bloody fingers planted in his coat pocket. Then, from beyond the grave, Battleby telephones Crawley. Battleby weaponizes his supposed demise to unnerve his former boss: "Oh, I'm dead enough. I heard the three of you talking by my coffin when nobody else was close. Do you want me to tell you what you said? Pine boxes have a wonderful resonance from the inside." He demands that the men publish a confession and go to prison. Crawley calls the hitman "Breaker Brock." Brock insists the assassination was successful. The next night, the men trace an eleven PM call from Battleby to a public telephone booth located outside the graveyard where the substitute body is buried. The men and Brock climb the cemetery fence after finding a communication wire running directly from the phone book to where the reader expects it to be, down into the fresh grave. Masterman digs up the coffin. As he prepares to open it, the telephone rings from within the coffin. Lafferty captures the abrupt shift from tense thriller to absurd, weird menace: Melvin had uncovered the coffin and nearly opened the lid when the muted voice of Battleby within it abruptly ceased. Then after a short pause a phone began to ring within the coffin. "Answer it, you little bugger, let's see you answer it," said Melvin Masterman. "If he answers it I'll die," said Thomas Crawley, and then without seeing whether he did or not Thomas Cromwell Crawley toppled over dead. Masterman answers the coffin telephone and speaks to McGilly (the rotting corpse of the substitute with his face blown off is still there). Battleby says that Crawley has "just walked in the door." Unnerved, Erpresser returns to his apartment, where Battleby and McGilly subdue him and steal his hidden wealth. Having cut off some of the corpses' fingers to get them printed, Masterman goes insane and is apprehended by authorities while wandering the streets saying a nursery rhyme. We aren’t told what the rhyme is, but, with the bloody fingers in mind, maybe "Ten Fat Sausages," "Five Little Ducks," or piggies. McGilly "impounds" the fortunes of the three wealthy men, keeps half of Battleby’s life savings, and the story ends with Willy and his nephew, who works in the morgue, talking about how little nine thousand dollars is. "Nine thousand dollars wouldn’t keep a seaman in snuff through one watch." Preposterousness is usually raised to being a virtue in Lafferty, but because "Get Off the World" works in the low-mimetic register of noir, it becomes preposterous in a way that would need parody to land—and it doesn’t look to me as if the story is parody, though it is metafictional. Lafferty plays it a little too straight. You can see the plot’s organization by sorting its effects into three categories—face, voice, and fingers—and by tracking how the ghost prank turns everything: the identities of three criminals break down just as the Battleby-as-ghost rests on the ideas of dismemberment and dislocation. A few things to note. As in “Three Men in the Morning, ” Past Master , and a handful of other Lafferty stories, we get the three-men-against-one setup. More importantly, even in early Lafferty much of social reality is a precarious, staged consensus, vulnerable to manipulation. This fits his never-ending fascination with the con game, not just as a source of fun, but as a way to test epistemological and ontological commitments. Here, the con pits its rigid triad of “conscienceless crooks,” Crawley, Masterman, and Erpresser, against an escalating practical joke. As the joke unfolds, it attacks the boundaries of each crook’s personal identity. Personhood is weirdly modular and artificial; you can swap it out as easily as you can swap a rubber mask onto a victim. The bad guys try to dominate this arrangement by monopolizing information and coercing silence, through Battleby’s death, to hide their crimes. But it turns out to be harder than they think. Instead of snuffing out the voice by killing the person, the killing of the person seems to free the voice. Their reliance on a stable, empirical reality underwriting their crimes makes them vulnerable to a counter-con, as McGilly exploits the limits the three crooks assume are immutable. They play by the rules of organized crime. McGilly doesn’t. In the broader context of Lafferty’s development, “Get Off the World” shows his early fascination with the rationalized supernatural. He seems drawn to the wildly paranormal, as we know, but not yet comfortable enough to go all in, one of the clearest signatures of prenucleation. That contrasts with his later work where the paranormal is left open or fully realized (as in his revision of Loup Garou , which shifts from faking a werewolf to a reality in which werewolves exist). This time he takes the classic trope of the call from beyond the grave and rationalizes it within the context of the con. The haunting is demystified into a trick run through a telecommunications circuit. The supernatural becomes information manipulation. The bodily horrors and spectral theater are never untethered from Willy McGilly’s menacing pranks. At the same time, there is real weirdness here, driven by the uncanny relationship between the authentic and the artificial. The story creates a symmetry between the fake bloody wax fingers and the real ones, and between the phenolic rubber mask and the two actual faces (the absent because obliterated shotgun victim-face and the living Battleby face). Perhaps one way to understand the story is just through a simple ghost story. The traditional ghost story puts pressure on integral human identity through dematerialization. Lafferty’s materialist con game in "Get Off the World" goes in the other direction. It produces an ontological loosening through play with material substitution. By introducing synthetic replicas of the self, the story displaces the boundaries of identity, dismantling them through physical proliferation rather than through the absence via spectralization. The uncanny realization of this material substitution is described when Erpresser confronts the face in his mirror: He went back to the large mirror intending at least to pull the face off of it, and it was then that he noticed for the first time in his agitation that this face was neither rubber, wax, nor phenolic; but instead was made of a rather pasty stuff of which the face of Battleby himself was composed. Erpresser hadn't known that there was a live man in the room with him. It is also a good example of a Lafferty signature: he combines extreme violence and gore with images of the artificial (fake fingers and a fake face) to produce moments of real violence that remain trapped within a larger context of derealization. My favorite example of this in Lafferty is in "Or Little Ducks Each Day," where Peckinpah-level violence is derealized through ketchup yet still shocks. For whatever reason, the story never really gets off the ground, and fairly late into it, Lafferty breaks the fourth wall, as if he recognizes that the story’s modal constraints and plot are working against each other. He is innovating but not innovating enough. This narrative intrusion implicates the reader in the absurdity: A man can be as sane as you (no not you, I'm not sure about you) and still not be able to explain adequately why he is walking down an empty street after midnight reciting a childish jingle to a handful of bloody fingers not his own. You'd have thought that man was crazy too. It is an interesting story. In hindsight points to more exciting ideas, but I see why it didn’t sell. It should be in a complete edition of Lafferty.

Slowly it wanders, — pauses, — creeps, — Anon it sparkles, — flashes and leaps; And ever as onward it gleaming goes A light on the Bong-tree stems it throws. And those who watch at that midnight hour From Hall or Terrace, or lofty Tower, Cry, as the wild light passes along, — "The Dong! — the Dong! The wandering Dong through the forest goes! The Dong! the Dong! The Dong with a luminous Nose!" — “The Dong with a Luminous Nose,” Edward Lear (1877) “What about the sex and sorcery. i don’t remember it,” Lafferty wrote in one of his late letters. His old Mexican typewriter was giving him trouble, so he decided to forgo capital letters. In another letter, Lafferty said he hoped “Sex & Sorcery” had not survived. He did not get his wish. “Sex & Sorcery” survived, a story set at the tail end of a hypersexualized twentieth century. It is a story I dislike, though it has its moments. Its protagonist, for instance, is a prominent pornographer named Jeb Porno. Toward the end of the story, Porno gets what he wants and is displayed in effigy as the “Man With the Luminous Dong”: “I'm proud to say that I do,” I told them, and they put it on. “Hey, you can't fool me with your pretending not to be impressed,” I crowed. “You know that you never saw one like mine. I'm sometimes known as the Butterfly that's hung like a Horse. And there's another thing that you don't seem to have noticed in this bright light. I'm known as ‘The Man With the Luminous Dong.’” I would rate the unpublished story as Lafferty indulging in some of his weakest tendencies. It is didactic and angry, grotesque in a way that rebounds on him, even if he is right. At the same time, he throws himself into it with his customary energy and linguistic ingenuity. Lafferty was a Budweiser man, and in this story, he says, “Hold mine. I’m going in.” Its plot is simple enough. Jeb Porno joins a six-person time probe that travels two hundred years into the future. He and five other experts pass through a post-electronic medium of blue smoke. Beyond it, they find a society whose affections are better ordered than those of the late twentieth century. Over the course of the visit, Jeb clashes with his hosts. He is outraged, just outraged, that the future people have abandoned the explicit public obscenity laws that, in his world, make obscenity the law of the land. People in the future prefer private intimacy, and Jeb reads them as a culture full of “sorcery.” Lafferty records the shock: “Rejoin?” I gasp, for it's as though I had suffered a great body stroke. “Have I heard you right?” I could hear my own bones rattling, and the world was reeling on the verge of collapse. “Rejoin from what? You mean that it is done in private?” The future people subject the travelers to telepathic dramas, and they eventually take Jeb to a museum that documents historical pathologies. He has his own wax statue, wax being one of Lafferty’s negatively charged symbols. Think of the Putty Dwarf, or other stunted Lafferty images . It is the stuff at the far end from implicit clay. Jeb Porno is proud of it all: Went to a nice small building with the sign on it: Museum of Jovial Insanities and Putrid Pathologies of the Late Twentieth Century . . . . I have a little space right behind the section devoted to Famous Mass Murderers and right across from the department dedicated to Defamers, Destroyers, and Dismal Demagogues . . . . there is my name on the wall there: JEB PORNO, WHO BEST TYPIFIES A PERIOD AND A PATHOLOGY On his return to his time, still outraged, he resolves to pass new legislation to preemptively destroy the future. I read the story as something like the obverse of “Nine-Hundred Grandmothers.” I know I am in the extreme minority in this reading, since I take the story to be (on one level) a sex joke that refuses to deliver its punchline. The joke is that your grandmother had sex with your grandfather, and Lafferty means for us to laugh at the naïveté of assuming that, because one does not turn sex into a show, one must not like it or know about it. Those people in Lafferty who know about sex and have it often, as we see in the Willoughbys, are often what Lafferty calls ordered people. They have the order of their affections rightly ranked. Someone will say that this sex-joke reading of "Nine-Hundred Grandmothers" robs the story of its great mystery. To that I say: you just do not know why the grandmothers are laughing. The point is a mystery. Mystery with a capital M . Don't settle for a toy, true believer . “Sex & Sorcery,” because it must show sex from the disordered side, is meant to be a take-no-prisoners satire of disordered love. Jeb turns sex into an idol. He builds a quasi-religion of coercive freedom around it (he says, “What is more important than sex?”). He worships his own dong. Voyeurism and compulsory participation are his civic sacraments. “No, no, no!” I bellow in what I bet is a loud-for-everybody blare. “Don't you know that you're in violation of the Compulsory Participation Law with this set-up? I'm not selfish. I want everyone to hear it all. It's got to be full-blast for everybody all the time. That's the basis of the turned-on society.” Porno is not a man with even a microfiber of human dignity. What really upsets him is that the future turns out to be a moral counter-witness. The laughter of the people in the future toward him is not the indulgent, amused laughter of the nine-hundred grandmothers, but the blistering laughter of mocking what is worthy of being mocked. In this case, it is a half-wit who does not understand that sex should be life-giving but not a public commodity. It deserves privacy, restraint, and personal integrity. Laffery even gives us his version of the birds-and-the-bees: “When do they do it, you ask? The people do it all the time, in season and out of season, in color and charm, in grace and in glory, now and tomorrow and yesterday, in the most pleasurable way, in the great artistry that is named tension, and in the great resolution that is named release.” Lafferty discusses his view of sex across the full span of human life at length in In a Green Tree . To Jeb Porno, though, that view must appear as sorcery, because the story counterfigures what is affirmatively sacramental—so that, from Jeb’s perspective, it can only register as transgression. The reappearance of beauty, art, subtlety, and good-humored laughter looks to him like black magic straight out of Sax Rohmer. When Jeb Porno goes home, he is no longer boastfully nude, but naked and enraged. The key passage for understanding this aspect of Lafferty comes from an unpublished portion of In a Green Tree : “And you'd feel funny asking Peggy about sex?” “Yes. I don't think she knows very much about the subject and I'd hate to embarrass her. My main question is ‘What is Explicit Sex?’ And my side questions are ‘Is Explicit Sex better than the regular kind?’ ‘Is it more fun?’ ‘Are the Irish against Explicit Sex?’ And ‘Why are they?’” “Hah, I don't believe that Explicit Sex is better that the regular kind, Irene, and I don't believe that it's any more fun. Etymological speaking, ‘explicit’ and ‘exploit’ are the same word, and that word means to ‘unfold’ or to ‘display.’ Things that are thrown wide open and have no secrets, they might be said to be ‘explicit.’ Things that are publicised and ballyhooed, they might be called ‘explicit.’ There are persons who like to keep a little privacy concerning their private affairs. There are people who like to keep a little mystery in things that are naturally mysterious. So those are not the people who like explicit sex. They like the regular kind, the mysterious and secret and private kind, the joyful-in-itself kind. Devotees of explicit sex always feel the need of the presence of third parties in some form or other, of an audience. And these third parties, on some form or other, they should applaud.” “Ah, that's my bag of oats!” Irene breathed. That is how it looked from the ordered side. And here is Jeb Porno: “Don't you know that you're in violation of the Compulsory Participation Law with this set-up? I'm not selfish. I want everyone to hear it all. It's got to be full-blast for everybody all the time. That's the basis of the turned-on societ y.” The Catholic view is that the unitive pleasure of sex belongs within the sacrament of marriage. There is nothing unitive about Jeb Porno’s sexual egocentrism. There is only rutting, animal pleasure. The story wins my sympathy, but I do not enjoy it. That comes down to how important the matter was to Lafferty, as I think it should be to anyone in a porned culture. The story will most likely appeal to readers who enjoy sophomoric humor, without recognizing that Lafferty is going over the top to savage that kind of sophomoricism and debased culture out of bilious frustration. Readers whose ears are related to Lafferty's ears will experience some acoustic nociception, like an ice pick being driven down the ear canal. Just how does one write a profane story about the sacred? It is a self-sabotaging performance:

“People think I am being droll when I answer to the question ‘Who do you think is the best short story writer in the world’ — ‘I am.’ Yes, I'm partly being droll, but partly serious.”— Letter to Joye Swain, 1987 I’ve been putting together notes for a Lafferty syllabus, which means sequencing texts and sketching a few lectures, wondering whether a Lafferty course is feasible. My one rule on the blog is don’t waste a reader’s time, but I’m not sure how to say what follows quickly. If you aren’t interested in the question of Lafferty and literary value, then this post isn’t for you. I'm going to think through a few things. If you read this blog, you will notice a specific methodology running through my posts: I take Lafferty seriously as a literary artist. I wanted to say a little about that. My thinking about how to read literature over the last decade has been heavily informed by Peter Lamarque’s Philosophy of Literature (2009). There are books that clear a lot of rubbish that builds up in one’s mind like a controlled burn, and Lamarque did that for me on the issue of literary value. For a long time, talking about literary value was off the table. In the doctoral program I attended, a leading postcolonialist with several University of Chicago publications behind her was leading a small seminar with four of us, and something happened that has stuck with me. We were a small cohort of six, and one of us, a female graduate student, had received news that her mother had committed suicide the day before. For whatever reason, the student decided not to skip or excuse herself from the seminar that week. We were reading several hundred pages of 18th-century economic ephemera, all of it with little literary value. When we discussed a brief fantasy about a coin's journey through England, the professor turned to the student and asked for her thoughts. The student, clearly not thinking clearly, made a terrible mistake. She said, “It isn’t very good.” Of course, none of us were reading the material because it was good, but because we were trying to understand the fictional representation of economics. The professor decided it was a moment to eviscerate her. The professor said, “What is good?” After about 10 minutes of horsewhipping, the female student excused herself, dropped out of the program, and blocked all contact with everyone in it. At that moment, I knew I would have an answer to the question, even if it was contentious, and Lamarque has helped me here. According to Lamarque, literary value is best understood from within a practice of reading works as literature (as art). You assume there is value. This is a bit like Hegel, in The Phenomenology of Spirit , refusing to start with skepticism and saying that it leads to despair. Start arguing with Sextus Empiricus, and you are not going to get anywhere. Lamarque then argues that value judgments are guided by shared expectations about what such literary works are like and what kinds of attention they reward. In this account, value is not a detachable property. He says it “resides in the quality of the experience a work yields,” especially along two broad dimensions. These are what I want to look at in regard to Lafferty’s extremely odd literary project. The first dimension is the “imaginativeness or creativity evident in the design of the work.” The second is “the richness of its content at both subject and thematic levels.” In other words, a work’s value is inextricably connected to (i) how its form is made—its organization, structure, and craft—and (ii) how its content develops toward themes that support reflection well beyond the immediate subject matter. On the thematic side, I rely on Lamarque's distinction between a theme as a bare proposition and a theme as something enacted through a work’s particulars. That is why you see on the blog many diagrams and tables meant to make navigating Lafferty’s extraordinary informational density much easier. The “triviality” problem—the idea that themes look banal once abstracted into slogans—arises when we treat themes as worldly generalizations detachable from the work. No one should need to read To Kill a Mockingbir d to know that racism is bad or Crime and Punishment to know that murder, if you are a normal person, is going to take a toll on your psychology. For my purposes, the relevant value question is usually how a theme is “worked,” how it develops through immense detail. That goes beyond the standalone proposition one might extract from it. I sometimes put a Lafferty theme in country-simple terms, but I would never say that Lafferty’s literary value depends on the propositional encapsulation of didactic material. I just think Lafferty is didactic. He cannot help himself. Put differently, the theme’s contribution to value is not that it supplies a maxim, but that it organizes attention, binds disparate elements, and promotes reflection as the reader tracks the theme’s transformations across the work. I think Lafferty is exceptionally interesting because of how what I call the Whole Lafferty rewards this kind of approach. It also places interpretation at the center of value. Lamarque has a pretty basic description of interpretation. He calls it a practice of “construal” in which readers assign significance to details that might otherwise look incidental. That assignment of significance provides reasons to attend to the text, and the value of a work depends on whether such attention is rewarded rather than frustrated. In other words, read a post and see if the details have been marshalled in a way that reorganizes your attention in a way that rewards it. Evaluation will then become inseparable from interpretation. What I try to evaluate when reading Lafferty is features as they act under a construal—for example, tracking a motif to see how its development contributes to an overall vision, which, in Lafferty’s case, if we are reading him on his own terms, is his quaint Catholic vision, which is always exploring the unfilled-out parts of the Magisterium. The other day, I read a scribble of his on a page where he wrote to himself, “It is all happening at once,” as if to remind himself of this, or as if he was shocked, once again, by how estranging that is and how he wants to capture it in his experiments with metaphysics. On the side of form, I treat design, form, and structure as more than optional ornaments, which is (obviously) not at all unusual for readers who enjoy writing as literature. In some of the posts here on Wittgenstein and attention, I’ve talked about the importance of seeing aspects. These design, form, and structure elements are central to reading literature as art that brings out ground and figure. Appreciating a work as literature, in my view, involves appreciating it as an artifact, as a linguistic structure. That puts me in the formalist camp. I am always asking how elements hang together to produce effects, acting on an assumption—a “Principle of Functionality”—that aspects of the design are not arbitrary. For this reason, the blog is likely to annoy the hell out of anyone who thinks, “Who are you to ascribe intention to Lafferty?” All I can say is that I think reading as an analytic institution necessitates this way of reading. This is an institutional/works-based notion of intention, not one of psychological ascription. If we accept something like the intentional fallacy or the death of the author, we create the problem of being self-sealing formalists or people who have lost the category of literature as something that is value-laden and normative. This holds true even when the surface seems disorderly, whimsical, or weird, as in works that deliberately play with apparent disorganization. But that is just where I land as a reader. Lafferty’s novels of the 1970s went (arguably) too far in this direction, especially some of the unpublished ones and The Elliptical Grave . What Lafferty ended up doing, I think, was coming out of that and seeing that he would use what he had learned by binding what he learned from them tightly to genre constraints, as if he was circling back to the early work, but this time as a wiser writer. So he no longer writes Iron Tongue of Midnight or Dark Shine , and he writes space operas like Annals of Klepsis or Arabian fantasies like Sindbad: The 13th Voyage . That is a formalist conclusion, but despite how it might look, formal analysis is not my final aim. It is a necessary stage toward assessing interest and value, what in a conversation with Daniel Otto Jack Petersen I have called the importance of having a logocentric Lafferty even if one wants to qualify or reject much of it: macrostructure or canon structure will always matter because it contributes to our perception of what the piecework work achieves, and because literary works are treated as “structured designs” when read as literature rather than mere sequences of events or statements. I believe Lafferty when he said he was writing one work, the Ghost Story. At the same time, this type of thinking rejects the idea that literariness can be reduced to a single formal-linguistic marker (such as foregrounding, semantic density, tall-tale panache, humor, or stylistic oddity). Such properties occur both inside and outside literature, and some highly valued literary works are completely transparent in style. The upshot is that form cannot be reduced to a checklist of linguistic features that automatically confer literary status. Lafferty’s relentless innovation of form shows that he appreciated this with unusual intensity. What is required is an account of how the writing—broadly conceived to include narrative technique and structural invention—becomes salient and supports “a search for layers of meaning.” I think all this is relevant to Lafferty. His reputation is so often managed through genre categories. Lamarque's 2009 book talks about this boundary issue by asking why “literature as art” would exclude “genre novels like murder mysteries or sci-fi.” It’s one of the reasons I think it’s probably a bad idea to try to get Lafferty appreciated as a science fiction writer, or genre artist, of importance, versus a literary artist of importance. The mere fact that a work is marketed or shelved as science fiction does not, by itself, settle whether it rewards literary expectations about design and theme. But you know this already because you like Lafferty. On the institutional account summarized above, the question is whether the work merits the kinds of interpretive attention characteristic of literary appreciation, and whether its value is realized through creativity of form and richness of thematic development. The only way to show that is to produce interpretations that go far beyond appreciation or celebration. That is really this hobby blog in a nutshell: just an ongoing collection of evidence that Lafferty can and should be read in exactly that way. I try to show how his work is a designed total artifact whose details repay construal, and how his body of writing is organized by serious thematic concerns rather than by disposable plot premises, and how he is driven by a mania for formal innovation. In the recent “Building Blocks” post, I thought it might be useful to stake out some methodological commitments, so I spelled out that I approach Lafferty as “fundamentally a metaphysical writer” who uses fiction to make claims about reality. I treat his humor and excess as serious games rather than ends, and I read his stories as ontological thought-experiments and tests a reader is meant to undergo. The point is what follows when a particular view of reality is allowed to run until it breaks. This is already a thematically serious picture in the sense relevant to Lamarque's framework, because Lafferty’s metaphysical content aims at “broad human interest” and at deep reflection on what is real, what is counterfeit, what kinds of beings exist, and how worlds can be metaphysically sealed or open. In that same post, I argued that Lafferty writes against the constraining megatext of science fiction by trying to bypass its habits. That seems to me one of the reasons that he gets harder as he develops as a writer. It is one reason I make the tactical decision to not treat him as a genre artist or to read his career through SF, as important as that is as a secondary operation. His escape route is a countervailing inherited structure of meanings (the Christian tradition, including marginal gnostic strands) and, centrally, eschatology. Whether or not a reader accepts every element of this view, the important point is that where most people seem to see a discrete series of brilliant performances (I would make an exception for a few Lafferty critics here), I see a stable set of organizing thematic preoccupations that are not reducible to single propositions. Instead, they are the Ghost Story motifs of his works: time, personhood, counterfeit worlds, the status of a shared reality, and the intrusion of the eternal into the present. That is the kind of thematic “unity and value” beyond immediacy that we find when we read works as literature. I also probably fail at this most of the time, but I try to give concrete instances regarding how Lafferty explores surrendering language and agency to control and to controlling machines. I see rereading as a process by which Lafferty’s Gnostic satire becomes even clearer on repeated reading, and one of my private tests of a Lafferty story world is how fully the “archons have already won” (the archons can be government, media, any number of things) and how characters have surrendered the logos to omnipresent, impersonal systems. I do not present this as a detachable, bumper-sticker message like “technology is bad” or “machines dehumanize us.” Lafferty clearly had a very complicated view of persons and machines, especially AI. I try to show how this configures how details are seen: who controls meaning, what it would mean for a machine to lie, what happens when language detaches from forms of life, what machines should count as persons, and what machines should not. That means the blog has a lot of pattern spotting. As with any piece of literature, a story’s value lies in how the theme is developed through particulars. What appears as a plot device becomes, under interpretation, a center of gravity that orders the reader’s attention and sustains rereading. Some examples. My post “Some Thoughts about ‘Through Other Eyes’” makes the relation between form and theme overt. I argue that Lafferty uses a rare stretch of limited third-person not just to make a general claim about people having private worlds, but also as a critique of the technologically mediated invasion of subjectivity, the misuse of personal data, and a warning against the mechanical attempt to bypass the mystery of other persons. I support this by pointing to the story’s own language about the shock of sudden perfect understanding. This is an example of a thematic interest that invites deeper, more far-reaching reflection, with the narrative perspective itself being part of the work’s design rather than a neutral delivery system. It is also an example of how evaluation depends on interpretation: the value of the limited third-person passage goes beyond a bare narratological fact. It is a feature whose effectiveness is assessed under a construal that links it to the theme of perspective and personhood. Similarly, in trying to think a little about Space Chantey , I argue Lafferty is not just decorating prose with couplets. He is using the couplet to generate the novel as he goes. I try to show how he throws the couplet form at the reader (especially the classical couplet tradition as parody) as an intellectual knife whose balance, antithesis, and satirical shape can control pacing, juxtaposition, and narrative energy. That is the power of the couplet, with its fierce powers of closure. This is an instance of the imposition of form on subject in the strong sense of that idea. Lafferty makes an eccentric design choice that organizes the work and alters which effects and meanings are available. The Space Chantey couplets are not arbitrary eccentricities, but purposive components whose role must be tracked if the work is to be appreciated as a whole. My post on “Marsilia V” develops a different kind of formal claim. There, I argue that Lafferty introduces one or two images in a story that will be a compacted map of the story. Andrew Ferguson has also recognized this feature in Lafferty. This is a description of a repeatable structural device (what I call “iconographic insetting”) that is not reducible to style at the sentence level. It is a claim about how meaning is distributed and constrained, shaping interpretation. Readers need to notice it if they are going to track innovation and the theme's significance. It makes certain elements salient. It invites the reader to assign significance. It produces unity by letting later details be read as developments of a formally planted key. In Lafferty, this can be simple. In the novels, it becomes incredibly complicated, something I have not written much about yet because I am trying to cover the short stories first. A major part of the blog is the Medieval understanding of allegory, crossed with ideas I take from Northrop Frye, because he seems to me the most helpful person for understanding what Lafferty is doing. In “Lafferty and the Sliding Scale of Allegory,” I take Frye’s idea that allegory ranges from overt and continuous to elusive and anti-allegorical, and I emphasize a category where allegory appears and disappears at the author’s pleasure rather than being continuous. In "Building Blocks," I connect this directly to an interpretive stance on Lafferty: his allegory is meant to be wobbly, because in its most ambitious forms, it aims at the highest form of Catholic allegory, anagogy. “Reading The Elliptical Grave ” connects Lafferty’s formal invention to thematic significance without reducing either to surface weirdness. I think Lafferty is weird, but we need ways of talking about that weirdness, so I point out that after the opening chapter, Lafferty refuses any further hand-holding. The novel’s core belief (humanity’s decline from primordial magnificence) defines the terms of the expedition narrative. I argue that the ellipse is both a metaphysical concept (projection, viewpoint, time linkage) and a principle shaping the reader’s experience. Lafferty writes like a mad engineer. He loves engineering our reading experience to reflect the confusion of being inside the elliptical grave. This instantiates the idea that disorder in Lafferty can be systematically cashed out, relying on devices that connect narrative episodes to a broader metaphysical frame—again, a case of theme as an organizing principle. Finally, one thing I often try to do is supply methodological evidence that Lafferty’s oddness is not just a private taste for eccentricity. It is a developing set of craft features that can be tracked and evaluated. That led me to write the “Hermeneutic Thoughts” post, in which I argue that when Lafferty is confusing, the first critical question is not “why is this hard?” but “why would someone do it this way?” There, I set out the two important rhetorical strategies I have found in thinking with Lafferty: pragmatic markers (producing an effect of oracy and plainspokenness even when the content is obscure) and counterfiguration (where the reader must ask what the opposite would be and why Lafferty chooses the counter-figure). I also argue that Lafferty is architectonic in his figuration. When we pay attention to these features, we are not thinking in a narrow, stylistic sense, but are looking for an organized set of techniques that guide the search for meaning, techniques which can be critically assessed for how well they focus the reader's attention, explain the work being read, and unify that work’s effects. Taken together, the evidence I have presented on the blog is meant to support the basic claim that Lafferty satisfies the two core dimensions of literary value. I could answer the postcolonialist professor why I think Lafferty is good. On the content side, Lafferty was pursuing persistent, serious thematic concerns—the metaphysics of reality and counterfeit worlds, personhood, time, the status of a shared world, and language as logos and social ground. On the form side, he innovated the structure of his narratives to a level that should be recognized as genius. Literary value? It begins with those two dimensions of innovation and the significance of theme. Of course, other writers have long recognized that Lafferty scores high on both dimensions.

It seemed, until I thought of it a bit, that I had written quite a few novels, and many shorter works, and also verses and scraps. Now I understood by some sort of intuition that what I had been writing was a never-ending story and that the name of it was “A Ghost Story.” The name comes from the only thing that I have learned about all people: that they are ghostly, and that they are sometimes split-off. But no one can ever know for sure which part of the split is himself. Daniel Otto Jack Petersen has a forthcoming article that everyone should read called " Good Weather for Gory Doppelgänger: Ecomonstrous Doubles, Eidolons, and Fetches in Three Tales by R. A. Lafferty." He was kind enough to let me read it, and I'll do my best to summarize its big picture, but fair warning: it's theoretically dense, and it doesn't pull its punches. Petersen builds on Steven Swarbrick's arguments in The Environmental Unconscious (2023) that early-modern poetry (and this goes for material life as well) is "pierced by lack," a Lucretian minus that at once wounds and energizes ecological desire. Adopting that premise, he argues that R. A. Lafferty's doppelgängers demonstrate how the same void shapes contemporary fiction. For Petersen, Lacan's Real, re-read through Lucretius, acts like this: Ontological State Functional Experience Lacanian Real Full Presence A traumatic gap in meaning; a psychic minus. Lucretian Void Empty Absence A generative gap in matter; a physical minus. The bold step is putting the Lacanian Real itself with this minus of the Lucretian void; that identification lets him treat Lafferty's doubles, fetches, and splits not as mere negations but as "shadowy subtractions of the Real," sub-material holes that make meaning possible by exposing its limits and granting "the jouissance of more truly un-centring ourselves in the radically open-ended semiosis and asemiosis of planetary existence." In short, Petersen transposes Swarbrick's eco-psychoanalytic Lucretian template from Renaissance verse to Lafferty's landscapes, presenting the ghost story as an art of circling the unknown: learning, again and again, to dwell beside the void at the center of the world. His essay is richer than this sketch can show, and, true to form, he keeps Lafferty unmistakably weird. By treating the doubles as "environmental unconscious," a crowded field of weather, animals, and wrecked terrains, Petersen does what many of us think needs to be done: take Lafferty's work very seriously as thought. And once you understand how Petersen's take on all this works, a wide range of Lafferty's stories look different: each split psyche cracks open an eco-poetic hole where the non-human speaks. This is a smart contribution to understanding the ghost story. When it appears in print, I'll write about its interpretations of the three stories it addresses. Reading it also had me thinking again about the shape of the ghost story. What Lafferty meant by it will always be up for debate, and one hopes it will continue to inspire work like the kind Petersen is doing. He and I seem to agree that one can enter into its fullness only by recognizing one’s own environed ghostliness. Petersen understands this better than just about anyone, even if he and I disagree on the nature of that ghostliness. What follows is not intended primarily as an assessment of his application of Swarbrick to Lafferty, but as an exploration of an alternative I find helpful. It is such a big question that, a while back, I started keeping a little notebook to understand what Lafferty means by "ghost." Why does he use that word, along with all the doublets and variations his readers will recognize, from spooks to fetches and back again? My view is that Lafferty chose the word "ghost" because he wanted to discuss the spiritual realm without being sententious. He did this well, especially considering how unlikely most readers are to equate "ghost" with "spiritual" in his well-known lines about what he was doing. You might ask, "If that's what he meant, why not say so?" There are likely many reasons. One, I think, is this: he used "ghost" because it generated the kinds of stories he liked to spin. And because he believed most modern people had suffered a type of amnesia. They no longer understood the word "spiritual." But they still had just enough left in them to recognize a ghost. This means that his complete statement amounts to something like this in its expanded form: "It seemed, until I thought about it a bit, that I had written quite a few novels, many shorter works, and also verses and scraps. Then I understood, by some sort of intuition, that what I had been writing was a never-ending story and that its name was A [Spirit/Spiritual] Story.  The name comes from the only thing I have learned about all people: that they are [spirits/spiritual] and that they are sometimes split-off [spirits]. But no one can ever know for sure which part of the split is himself." If one could work out what he meant by spiritual being, one would have a pretty good sense of what he meant by being a ghost. He was wise not to use the word "spiritual" here because he recognized that the spiritual is much stranger and larger than most people will concede. It is full of mystery, like a ghost story. This is a clear example of what I've called counterfiguration in his thought. The best-developed instance of what this ghostliness amounts to is the image of inside-out people, souls, and balloons in Arrive at Easterwine . These are complicated discursive images. The pages they appear on are some of the hardest in his work. With that in mind, I think Charles Taylor's ideas may be helpful, and they also mark a place where I part ways with Petersen. Taylor's book A Secular Age  (2007) has shaped much of the contemporary conversation on secularity, and I've been using one of its core distinctions to think about Lafferty for some time: the contrast between the porous self and the buffered self. keeping in mind that it is just a means to an end. The porous self is Taylor's term for the kind of identity that dominated the pre-modern, enchanted world, a cosmos alive with spirits, demons, and meaningful forces. The boundaries of the self were permeable. The outside world could flow into a person's inner life. Meanings, emotions, and moral states were not seen as generated from within but as imposed by external agents through what Taylor calls influence. A person could be possessed by a demon, transformed by a magic potion, or filled with divine grace. This same openness meant there was no firm line between the spiritual and the physical. A holy relic could heal the sick, and a curse could ruin a harvest because meaning itself had causal power. Charles Taylor's Porous Self The porous self was thus exposed and vulnerable, living in a world where the borders between mind and cosmos, self and other, were fluid and in constant exchange. Lafferty's characters seem to live in this kind of world. Let's consider several examples of the porous self in Lafferty’s fiction. Such instances abound to the extent that one can begin virtually anywhere. In “Dream,” a voice in a “noisome dream” informs the dreamer: “You are not dreaming . . . This is the real world. But when you wake you will be dreaming.” The statement exemplifies an external force that destabilizes the boundary between dream and reality. Similarly, the phenomenon of recurring “wart-hog-people dreams” experienced by the populace, and the question of whether “the wart-hogs were real and the people a dream,” suggests a shared external influence acting upon collective consciousness. In “Snuffles,” the eponymous creature addresses Brian Carroll with the claim: “How could there be anything in your mind if I did not put it there?” This scene portrays a telepathic intrusion, rendering the boundary between Snuffles’ external consciousness and Carroll’s internal thought as permeable. A related dynamic appears in “Adam Had Three Brothers.” The “Wreckville bunch,” or Rrequesenians, constitute an external group determined that they “cannot have uncontrolled talent running loose in the commonalty of mankind.” Here, an effort to restrict individual potential and freedom reveals a collective mechanism of external control. This pattern can be found in “Seven-Day Terror.” Clarissa, a young girl, casually causes objects to “disappear” and “come back.” Her response, “Why, of course I can. Anybody can. Can't you?” signals a porousness between human will and physical reality, one that is portrayed not as an extraordinary gift but as a latent capacity that should be accessible. The motif is at the heart of “Seven Story Dream.” George Handle, described as “easily led,” is subjected to conditioning by Gilford Gadberry, who employs a “compelling voice” that plays night after night during Handle’s sleep. As a result, Handle confesses to a murder committed only in a dream. The episode shows the extent to which external manipulation can infiltrate and reshape the internal world of the self, eroding the distinctions between memory, dream, self, and reality. Together, these stores should show aspects of the porous self. They dramatize the ease with which external forces can pervade thought, will, and perception, exposing the split in the boundaries that are denied in modern individual identity. This contrasts with what Taylor calls the buffered self, the characteristic identity of the modern, disenchanted age. It is marked by a firm, "buffered" boundary that separates the inner world of thought, feeling, and purpose from the outer world, which is understood as neutral and mechanistic. This boundary shields the self, making it feel secure from the spiritual forces that once haunted the porous self. Within this protected interior, the self becomes the primary source of meaning and order. It no longer discovers purpose in the cosmos but imposes it through disengaged reason and instrumental control. While this shift grants a new sense of freedom, power, and self-possession, it also introduces the central dilemma of modernity. Charles Taylor's Buffered Self The same buffer that ensures safety may also cut the self off from deeper meaning. The result is a condition of malaise. It gives us a sense of flatness, disconnection, and a world emptied of the transcendent. Lafferty's art appears to be specifically designed to attack this condition. Like the porous self, the buffered self appears in Lafferty everywhere, often through societies or individuals who create barriers to shield themselves from chaos, unpredictability, nature, the numinous, or existential vulnerability. His Camiroi exemplify this tendency. They prize a life “governed by reason” and are “incapable of” producing “bad Earth music, bad Earth painting and sculpture and drama,” instead needing to “import” such imperfections. This reflects a deliberate cultural effort to buffer themselves from disorder, passion, or “incompetence” that could disrupt their pursuit of the “good life.” While they acknowledge a “religion,” it is distinct from Earth’s and seems a more rationalized, less “revelatory” system. Their state of “Golden Mediocrity” and life on a “serene plateau” imply a conscious rejection of the “great heights and depths” that characterize a more porous existence. This reflects the concept of “sterility through refinement”—a process of excising “unruly elements” as a form of mental buffering, much like Michael Fountain’s ideal of the golden bowl in Fourth Mansions, which I will examine shortly. A similar dynamic appears in one of Lafferty’s lightest and most forgettable stories, “Try to Remember,” but one that hits close to home. Professor Diller’s use of a “small black book prepared by his wife” to hold “all the unessential details of his regime” and “save him time” offers a perfect illustration of individual buffering. By externalizing the inflow of “unessential” information, Diller allows his “busy and thoughtful” mind to focus on “great things.” Predictably, this reliance leaves him vulnerable. When he loses the device that helps regulate his cognitive environment, he experiences a profound disorientation, questioning his own identity: “If he is Professor Diller, then who in multicolor blazes am I?” His crisis reveals the fragility that can result when a buffered self confronts an unmediated reality. “The Polite People of Pudibundia” gives one of the clearest examples of societal buffering in Lafferty’s work. The extreme politeness of the Pudibundians, including their use of “deferential balls” and avoidance of direct address, functions as a “ritual shield” designed to prevent “too intimate an encounter of our persons [which] may be fatal.” The literal danger of unmediated contact (“the direct gaze of the Puds kills,” even themselves) explains why their eyes are “always shielded.” This is a society that has constructed elaborate social and physical buffers to defend against a potentially lethal existential vulnerability. Their refusal to lie, even when doing so might protect others, further reinforces the rigid, buffered structure of their lives. Finally, “The Pani Planet” explores the buffering of narrative and reality. The Pani’s control over storytelling is suggested in Ieska’s remark that “Stories of bamboozle may not be told,” signaling a conscious effort to manage societal narratives and maintain a particular version of reality. This buffering serves to preserve stability and prevent chaos. The story dramatizes the Pani’s porous understanding of life and death and the humans’ buffered, scientific worldview. General Raddle’s resurrection and transformation, contrasted with Doctor Mobley’s descent into madness, illustrate what happens when a buffered mind encounters phenomena it cannot assimilate. The Pani’s apparent ability to “fix” dead bodies disrupts the human belief in a firm boundary between life and death, shattering the buffered framework that once sustained the characters’ understanding of the world. Taylor develops these ideas about the porous and buffered self further in a way that is especially useful for readers of Lafferty. Without going too deep into the whole argument, two terms are key: influence and causal power. They are the two fundamental principles that structure the porous self's existence in an enchanted world. These are not merely beliefs. They are experienced as active, external forces that shape the self's reality. The idea is that meanings are not generated from within. They are imposed from without, often by spiritual agents or charged substances. This makes the self vulnerable. A person might be possessed by a demon, filled with divine grace, or overtaken by black bile understood as an external force. Similarly, causal powe r marks the collapse of any hard boundary between the moral and the physical. A holy relic does not symbolize healing. It enacts it. Its power is real and direct, capable of curing disease or warding off storms. For the porous self, these two powers often worked together. A single sacred act could bring both physical healing and spiritual renewal. Influence and causal power were fused. The self was not separate from the world. It was an integrated participant in a cosmos where meaning and force were inseparable. Conversely, the buffered self is formed through the systematic dismantling and denial of the world in which influence and causal power operate hand in hand. The modern, disenchanted worldview establishes a firm boundary between the inner mind and a neutral, mechanistic outer world. Influence is negated because feelings and meanings are now seen as subjective responses generated from within. They are no longer understood as things that can be imposed by spirits or magical forces. The self is sealed off and protected from such psychic intrusion. Causal power is also denied by a scientific view of the universe, which runs according to impersonal, value-neutral laws. The spiritual or moral significance of an object does not affect its physical properties. A relic may carry symbolic meaning, but it cannot heal. The buffered self does not experience these powers. It observes them from a distance, explaining them through reason as cultural beliefs or psychological states. Its identity is shaped not through vulnerable participation but through control and mastery over a world emptied of these deeper, enchanted connections. With all this in mind, I'd like to walk through how I think about the ghost story by breaking down Lafferty's statement and moving through it slowly, with Charles Taylor's work in mind. As always, the goal is not to impose an external model onto Lafferty. The aim is to see whether the model can help bring us closer to his work. And if it cannot, it should be chucked aside. " I understood by some sort of intuition . . . " Here, I would point to the limits of disengaged reason and the reality of what Taylor calls influence. Lafferty's understanding does not come from logical deduction or scientific analysis, the usual tools of the buffered self. It comes as an intuition. This is precisely what Taylor means by influence: a deeper meaning about the world presses itself onto the self. It breaks through the ordinary, disenchanted immanent frame. The way Lafferty comes to this insight is not the result of buffered thinking. It belongs to the porous world. ". . . that they are ghostly . . ." Lafferty recreates the experience of the porous self through art because he is spiritually attuned to it himself. The Laffertian ghost is a poetic figure that re-embodies the porous self. What is a ghost? It is a being whose boundaries are not solid. It passes through walls, something that appears often in Lafferty's work. It is present but not entirely material, no matter how we define that. It belongs to an enchanted world. If this is right, then to say that people are "ghostly" is to say they are inherently porous, whether or not they have withdrawn into buffered individualism. Their inner lives are not sealed off from the world. They remain open and vulnerable to external meanings, spiritual forces, the transcendent, and the feelings of others. Things beyond their control can haunt them. This is the human condition that the modern buffered identity tries hardest to deny. A brief example to make this clearer and set up the question of doppelgängers. Let's consider one of the most important doublets in Lafferty, Miguel Fuentes and Michael Fountain. Chapter XI of  Fourth Mansions  has the following epigraph from Ecclesiastes 12:5-6: "— and one fears heights, and he shall be afraid in the road . . . before the silver cord is snapped and the golden bowl is broken, and the pitcher is shattered at the fountain . . . " This sets up Michael Fountain to learn the limits of the buffered self the hard way. Lafferty is clear to show the reader that Michael Fountain, the lecturing humanist, thinks he supports the bowl: “What we are talking about are the world and the lives which we are given to fashion as our tasks. These are in the form, as I see it, of a large, fine, precious, crystal bowl, the Golden Glass Bowl, which we hold in our hands. True, it is not nearly so large a bowl as we once wished to fashion, but now we have come to understand that it is as large and as heavy a bowl as we are able to lift and hold.” To follow what happens, one should understand the image from Ecclesiastes : a silver cord from which a golden bowl of oil hangs. When the cord snaps, the bowl falls away from the vertical dimension of existence that had sustained it; metaphorically, this is the silver cord of life and self. The image appears in other Biblical scriptures as well. Michael Fountain, the buffered half of the doublet, sees only the bowl. His blind to the silver cord and its opening upward into transcendence. In Past Master , the golden bowl is Golden Astrobe itself, along with its world-age, both wanting to cut the cord that supports them, but in Fourth Mansions , the porous self of Miguel Fuentes destroys the buffered self of his double, Michael Fountain. The climax reveals how the doubling of selves is bound to the dynamic between the porous and the buffered. It is tempting to quote the entire lead-up, but here is the relevant passage: Michael Fountain, dictating privately in his own rooms thirteen hundred miles away, had become highly nervous but he still composed brave words for his lecture: “We come to apex, and it is no way elevated or outstanding; we come to perfection, and to perfect simply means to finish; we come to climax, and it is beautifully flat and undistinguished. We have completed the world. Behold it!” And in some manner Michael Fountain was holding a large, fine, precious, crystal bowl—The Golden Glass Bowl—in his two hands. It was pretty. It was almost substantial. “This is the world,” Michael intoned in a self-induced trance. “This is our lives, this is our final achievement. Worry not that it is small: it is the largest world ever, if we will not allow a larger one. Worry not that it is flawed: we ourselves are the flaws: and if we say that we are not flaws, then who is there to contradict us? Worry not that it is fragile, so long as we are very careful not to drop it.” “Drop it!!” the thunder-clap voice of Miguel Fuentes exploded. Everybody in the entire communication jumped at the cannon-barking violence of that command. And Michael Fountain dropped his world. It tinkled into a thousand tinny pieces. It shattered and all the light flickered out of it. The face of Michael Fountain also broke and shattered and the light went out of it also. He cast himself down and was racked by dry sobs. “How did we go wrong? What did we forget?” Michael moaned. The epigraph tells us what they forgot. They forgot the silver cord. This is to say that what Fountain forgot was not that there is a minus, but that there is, and always was, something more: a presence to which he was tethered, and which stood above him all along. ". . . and that they are sometimes split-off." Now we come to the schizo-gash, the slice in the doubles, the cleaving off of the fetches and the doppelgängers, the full implication of what we see in the Miguel Fuentes/Michael Fountain doublet. These are signs of the split. The buffered self is what remains after that split. It marks the loss of enchantment. It is the modern condition. To be split off is the buffered self’s defining feature. With one of the engineers of the buffered self, Ludwig Feuerbach, Michael Fountain says: "There are no exterior monsters who trouble the world either in attacking it or in defending it. They are not real." In this way, the buffered self draws a firm line between the inner mind and the outer world. It relies on disengaged reason, which separates mind from body and reason from passion. It sees the world as emptied of spirits, gods, and moral force. It is, to quote Michael Fountain again, the "apex" that is "no way elevated or outstanding." Lafferty does not treat this as our complete nature; he shows us the entanglement of Fountain and Fuentes. He sees it as something we sometimes become when we look at the world and see it as Michael Fountain does: "and it is beautifully flat and undistinguished. We have completed the world." This is the perfectly buffered plane of Flatland. "But no one can ever know for sure which part of the split is himself." Here is the central dilemma and cross-pressure of the secular age. It is also a key part of Lafferty's statement. He names the predicament. We are not simply porous or simply buffered. We live in the tension of the split. We build a "split-off" buffered identity to gain safety, control, and freedom. We tell ourselves that this is the authentic, mature version of ourselves. But our "ghostly" porous nature keeps coming back, in our hunger for meaning, our experience of love, our awe before beauty, our fear of death, and our sense of something beyond. This is what Carmody Overlark’s Studies in the Imagination  is getting at in The Devil is Dead . " Could we understand that world, we would understand ourselves better; for we also are part of that back-brain world to some degree. It was the ‘other people,’ the ‘Ugly’ people who gave to us whatever ghostliness we have, and whatever imagination. We gave only forebrain consciousness. " As a novel, The Devil is Dead  suspends the reader in the region of the back brain and the porous self until, almost out of nowhere, it drops the rationalizing explanation of the Neandertal conspiracy, giving the reader Carmody Overlark’s concept of the forebrain to rationalize away what has happened. The Miguel Fuentes (back brain/porous) and Michael Fountain (forebrain/buffered) difference appears in many places across Lafferty’s work. Sometimes it’s ontological, sometimes psychological, sometimes political, and sometimes theological. Usually, it’s several of these at once. The Devil is Dead  stages this difference in its own way, and its doppelgängers are not reducible to those in Fourth Mansions . For instance, it matters that it is none other than Carmody Overlark, that enemy of the fourth mansion, who writes the quoted passage in The Devil is Dead . Lafferty suggests that we can never know for sure which side of the split carries the cross-pressure. We are caught between two strong ways of being. Is my true self the rational, self-controlled agent, skeptical of revelation? Or is it the open, vulnerable being who still longs for the transcendent and the revelatory? Am I betraying my grown-up, scientific self when I feel that longing, or am I betraying my deeper self when I suppress it? That is what makes this the never-ending story for us. The porous and non-porous selves are useful analytic tools for getting at Lafferty’s strangeness and wonder without installing a void, the Lacanian Real, as an ineffable centre or condition of possibility. This isn't for any apologetic reason, but simply because it takes into account more of what is going on in Lafferty’s work. The Real is the Lacanian order that lacks a signifier, so the moment you name it, you draw it into the Symbolic Order and erase what it was. It therefore shows itself only as a rupture or blank in discourse. Because a sacrament  is a sign that grants access to real presence and communicates efficacious grace through it, the Lacanian Real is, by definition, non-sacramental. Of course, this is an ontological critique of Petersen's way of reading Lafferty, but Petersen is making an ontological argument about Lafferty. Petersen might argue that I overlook the radical, materialist, and non-human core of his argument. I would say that I don't. It's that I agree with Lafferty who wrote in "Notes on the Golden Age," " Consider three trash or pulp fields of the hard and soft sciences: Darwinism, Marxism, Freudism. These three things were real pulp theories, but transmuting nostalgia has kept them working like grist mills. " As a final note, Petersen, as I’ve said, sees a minus in Lafferty’s ghostliness because of the minus in matter. His explanation is ontological and psychological, but not historical. He writes: “The more these doubles press into space and physicality, the more they exemplify the minus encountered in matter. They are not immaterial but submaterial, shot through with the holes of Lucretian materialism, shadowy subtractions of the Real.” An ontological explanation of Lafferty’s doppelgängers can only be partial. Why? Because of human fallenness, which Lafferty returns to in nearly every text. This fallenness is a transhistorical condition, but it takes a particular form in modernity, assuming, as Lafferty does, that human history begins with the Fall. Alienation from the transcendent today is not what it was in the past. It looks different. It is shaped by what Charles Taylor calls the secular age, a time when the religious and the non-religious coexist, and where the background conditions for belief have undergone significant shifts. Any account of the doppelgänger motif, ontological or otherwise, must be grounded in both the anthropology of the Fall and the cultural experience of late modernity. This is not because the reader must believe the Fall is real, but because Lafferty did, and he was unusually consistent in the coherence of the beliefs that inform his art. For him, it all hung together. “Now I understood,” he wrote, “by some sort of intuition that what I ha d been writing was a never-ending story and that the name of it was ‘A Ghost Story.’” I'll wrap up with Aloysius Shiplap, who speaks at the close of Arrive at Easterwine . His words will mean very different things, depending on how we weigh the issue of plus and minus. “This, Cogsworth, is the limbus lautumiae  of which the Sons will write when they understand it more. This is no lost or furtive limbo. It is the quarrying limbo in all its agony and estrus. This is the mother quarry itself. All the grand worlds—which we have never seen, which we can’t imagine—have been sculpted out of it. They are the holes in it, they are what gives it its wild and riven shape. But look how much else new space is left. And look also that the holes do not remain holes. We have gazed at it all wrong: we’ve seen only the dark afterimages, not the bright fire itself. Here in limbo we already have intimation of these creating worlds. The spherical answer wasn’t entirely wrong, nor was the saddle-shaped answer, nor the torus-shaped. From this young quarry may not great worlds still be called?” “We should have guessed it,” said Glasser. “It isn’t as if each of us hadn’t been in one before. We all have been, except Epikt.” “And have I not been,” I demanded. notes: Definitions: P:  Lafferty’s doubles/ghosts primarily express a fundamental lack  (minus), based on Lacanian Real + Lucretian matter. S:  Sacramental presence = a sign that communicates real presence (a core feature of Lafferty’s Catholic vision). L:  Lafferty’s fiction presupposes sacramental presence , something like porous selfhood, enchanted ontology. R:  Lacanian Real = that which cannot be signified or made present through a sign  (non-sacramental by definition). F:  A faithful reading of Lafferty’s ghostliness must account for the possibility of sacramental presence. Premises: ( P1 ) Doubles, splits, ghosts are expressions of ontological lack (minus). ( P2 ) The Lacanian Real is non-sacramental: it cannot be communicated through a sign (R). ( P3 ) Sacramental presence requires that signs can communicate real presence (S ≠ R). ( P4 ) Lafferty’s fiction, via its Catholic imagination, language, and narrative play, presupposes sacramental presence (L). ( P5 ) Therefore, any model that treats ghostliness solely as lack (P) is structurally incapable of fully accounting for L (S ≠ R, P excludes S). Intermediate conclusion: ( C1 ) (P), grounded in R, cannot account for the sacramental dimensions of Lafferty’s ghostliness (F is violated). Further premises about interpretive fidelity: ( P6 ) A faithful interpretation of an author’s work should strive to account for the author’s core metaphysical vision, where it is textually supported. Anyone is welcome to reject this principle. ( P7 ) Ignoring or negating the sacramental dimension of Lafferty’s fiction contradicts this interpretive fidelity to Lafferty's artistic aims (violates P6). Final conclusion: ( C2 ) Therefore, P, however sophisticated or interesting, is structurally unable to account for Lafferty’s ghostliness because it is ontologically closed to the possibility of sacramental presence.   Forced Trilemma: Option Result Deny that Lafferty gestures toward sacramental presence (deny P4) Contradicts abundant textual evidence and Lafferty’s known worldview Claim that the Lacanian Real allows for sacramental presence (deny P2 or P3) Contradicts Lacanian theory itself and breaks the model, though some postmodern non-Catholic theologians have tried to place the Lacanian Real within the tradition of apophatic theology Admit that the reading is an external theoretical imposition (deny P6/P7) Concedes that the reading is not faithful to Lafferty’s vision

Well, I started writing everything. I wrote a Saturday Evening Post story and an American Magazine story and a Collier’s Story , and some sort of a western story, and science fiction and mystery stories. I sent them around. The science fiction story sold and the others didn’t, so after several repetitions then, I just wrote science fiction. It took me about a year before I was selling. — "An Interview with R. A. Lafferty" (1983), D. Schweitzer “L’Avare” is a 1958 vignette that looks as if it would have been at home in The Saturday Evening Post , with its colorful local character, a miser, and its ironic twist and implicit moral dimension. It’s brief. It’s very slick. An older man tells his younger companion the story of Alphonse Aler, the miser. Many years ago, Alphonse would spend a nickel each night on a cigar. That is, until he noticed that another man, Lawrence Labatt, purchased a twenty-five-cent cigar every evening, took only a few puffs, and left it smoldering on a stone ledge. Alphonse stopped buying his own cigars and instead began collecting and smoking the expensive ones Labatt left behind in the dark. From here, Alphonse expanded his methods of acquisition without expenditure. At Saint-Ange's restaurant, he sat at uncleared tables to pocket the previous diners' tips; then he would leave only a ten-cent tip of his own when he finished his meal. For breakfast, he ate leftover food off other customers' plates. Alphonse eventually got his morning coffee for free after the manager threw his payment back at him, saying that Alphonse must need it more. To avoid paying rent, Alphonse imposed himself on an acquaintance who let him sleep in an extra bed at no cost. He escalated from stealing tips to stealing clothing by taking hats, coats, and shoes left unattended in public places. Finally, he pocketed loose change from his workplace. The rationale was always the same: Alphonse was saving rather than stealing. At the end of the vignette, the old man points out a factory on the skyline and says to his companion that Alphonse is now the millionaire owner of Aler Industries. The older and younger men keep walking until the old man stops to buy a fifty-cent cigar, at which point the tobacconist greets him as Monsieur Labatt. Labatt takes a few puffs of his cigar. He places it gently on a stone ledge. A chauffeured car pulls up to the ledge. The driver retrieves the discarded cigar to hand it to the passenger in the back seat. Labatt identifies the passenger as Alphonse, noting that they have not missed this routine in thirty years. This is Lafferty at his most traditional. "L'Avare" takes its title from Molière's 1668 comedy of the same name, and its protagonist's name from French slang (an alphonse  is a social parasite, usually one who takes advantage of women) while Aler comes from Latin alere , "to nourish." There is thus something like “to nourish the parasite” built into the character’s name, which of course Monsieur Labatt does. One of the signs that this is a Lafferty story is the language's thorough theological grounding. Just a few examples: "In the cool of the evening" is a Genesis 3:8 reference, with Lafferty ironically reminding the reader that the scenes are in a post-lapsarian world. We are repeatedly told that Alphonse is a saving man, with that word’s soteriological implications being on the surface and becoming more damning with each repetition. Lafferty uses phrases such as "it pained his soul," "blessed with an extra bed," and "not immaculate in his person," which all pervert sacred vocabulary into alibis for avarice. My favorite of these allusions in the story is subtle: But he did not consider it stealing. Had he so considered it, I am sure he would not have done it. A damning take on Luke 23:34. The story’s organizational structure is Lafferty at his simplest. He parallels the opening and closing scenes, which could be set in France or in New Orleans, though the “sinker” allusion makes me favor New Orleans. There are small interruptions from the young man throughout the story. Everything about Alphonse changes except his character. He grows old. He moves from poverty into wealth, from walking to riding, from using his own hand to using the hand of his menial, his chauffeur. Labatt, by contrast, is the same man, older and still content. He takes the same evening walk, uses the same tobacconist, lays the cigar on the same stone, and shows the same gentleness. There are two twists at the end. The first is that Labatt has been the narrator. The subtler one is that Alphonse has incorrectly believed he was being sneaky in taking the cigar, just as he was mistaken about being sneaky at the Saint-Ange, and this has only hurt him. Labatt has been leaving the cigar for Alphonse out of pity, just as the manager gave Alphonse free coffee: "Ah, yes, that is Alphonse. We have not missed for thirty years. He is a very saving man." That is a shared view from Labatt’s perspective. Alphonse experiences it only as an “I”— I take the tip, I steal the clothing, I take the cigar . As I said, this is slick Lafferty, but it is competently done, with the center of its message found in the second paragraph: Alphonse had a terrible struggle with himself, but whether he won or lost is a question of viewpoint. The question of "whether he won or lost" is Matthew 16:26. Alphonse seems to have gained the whole world, but what started many years ago in the cool of the evening now takes place at full night.