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“We do not even know what his character is,” said Doctor Fell. “Most men who sound vicious take out their viciousness vocally. And all of the sadists I have known, and I have known a great many in thirty years of police work, are mild of talk and appearance and inclined to banter. You will have to admit that Soapy Seeley is not what we might call a sterling character. A man of sterling character is not arrested two hundred plus either thirteen or fourteen times in ten years. And all of the arrests were not for drunkenness. He has gone on any number of violent binges. If he is crossed when he is very drunk he will use any weapon that is handy on anyone who is present. He once inflicted thirty-nine shallow stabs on a poor bum who happened to be drinking with him. He did this with a can opener that fortunately would not stab more than three-eighths of an inch deep. He did it in a sudden fury because the bum was taking too long to open a can of beer with it. He has used jagged wine bottles for weapons. He has used half bricks. He has beat up his last three landladies. Any number of times he has been guilty of breaking and entering. He has not been picked up as a molester, but we do not know that this was primarily a sex crime. And yet in a way I am sure that it was , and that this may be the answer to a line of them that curiously goes back ten years.” This is another prenucleation Lafferty story that uses the police interrogation to pattern its plot. The title alludes to Dr. John Fell (1625-1686), best known now through Tom Brown’s English adaptation of Martial’s Epigram I.32 (“ Non amo te, Sabidi, nec possum dicere quare . . .”). The original Latin says, in effect, “I don’t like you, Sabidius, and I can’t say why; I only know I don’t like you.” It was a reworking of Catullus. According to legend, the satirical Brown was a student at Christ Church, Oxford, where he faced expulsion by the dean, who was Dr. Fell. Fell offered to remit the punishment if Brown could produce an impromptu translation of a Martial epigram. Brown complied (maliciously) and turned it into a zinger aimed at Fell himself: “I do not like thee, Dr. Fell, / The reason why I cannot tell; / But this I know, and know full well: / I do not like thee, Dr. Fell.” From there, it became one of the most quoted pieces of light verse in English, although the famous version differs from what Brown wrote . For a long time, “Dr. Fell” was a byword for an unaccountable, instinctive dislike. In “I Don’t Like You,” Lafferty gives the reader a Dr. Fell far more sinister than the historical figure. The story’s main character is Soapy Seeley, a likable bum, arrested for the murder of Doris Dark, a crime we would now call overkill. Doris Dark was young and attractive who was strangled. Her name is perhaps a play on Doris Day, a Catholic who swam the other way across the Tiber in the 1940s in becoming a Christian Scientist. Dark’s neck was broken and then she was stabbed many times. During a preliminary hearing, lawyer Joe Plunkett (who also appears in the unpublished "Milly" ) and police physician Dr. Charles Fell talk about the nature of identity and the probability of Seeley's guilt. The evidence is damning. Soapy was at the victim's apartment after midnight. On his person were found Dark’s precious $100 bill and her key. Even worse, a blood-crusted jackknife with Soapy’s fingerprints is discovered under the victim's sofa. Seeley says the knife belongs to him, evening offering to identify the prints (he knows his own), but he also says he was drunk and has no memory of the night's events, except for two certitudes: he knows he did not wake up where he fell asleep, and, before that, he knows he cut his hand on his knife while trying to open a wine bottle. He is pretty sure he will be hanged for the crime and makes a bet with Plunkett about the outcome of the case. The investigation advances. There is more interrogation of Seeley. There are interviews with the victim's acquaintances. Junie Gogarty describes Dark as a young woman who was kind to lowlifes like Seeley. She says that Seeley often slept in Dark's room when intoxicated. Dr. Fell browbeats Seeley at one point, setting up the allusion that gives the story its title: "You are a sponger and a leacher and a drunkard. You have never had any regard for anyone but yourself. You will take anything from anybody, even a life, to gratify yourself. You are as sane as a Solon and as mean as the devil. You have committed the most dastardly murder I have ever encountered and you will pay for it to the extreme. You are the most despicable criminal I have ever encountered." "Doc, I don't like you either." Dr. Fell has one odd peculiarity, though: a defective left eye that never fully opens or closes, which Seeley sees as a sign of insanity. He knows this because he once sent off for a correspondence course on medical matters. A witness from across the hall next testifies that she heard the voice of a "smooth-talking dude" in the room at the time of the murder. Although Lieutenant Rich thinks this identifies Seeley, the witness expresses doubt upon hearing Seeley speak in person. Are they "talking about the same dude?" It turns out that the voice heard was that of Dr. Fell. The story ends with Dr. Fell confessing to the murder of Doris Dark. He followed her home, found Seeley asleep on her sofa, and planted the knife and money on Seeley's person before carrying the bum to a nearby alley. Fell says that he killed Dark after she looked at him with contempt and rejected his advances. The story closes with a dark little coda highlighting the bitter irony of Fell's institutional fate versus Seeley's: But in a way Soapy did not have the last laugh. For the doctor is still alive and well and minds his pleasant confinement not at all. He writes up notes on fanciful medical and psychiatric cases, and he talks at great length to the other patients; for he is indeed a smooth-talking old dude.And Soapy Seeley suffered an unfortunate hanging two years later when he mistreated unto death with a broken bottle a fellow bum in the after-midnight hours. Soapy Seeley is one of Lafferty’s more distinctive characters—a man of low character who is at the same time absolutely honest. One of the funnier moments in an unpublished Lafferty story happens when we read about Soapy’s violent past, including his stabbing of another bum. We find Lafferty’s fixation with eyes, before he developed his technique of noetic darkening (no counterfiguation here), in the half-shut left eye of Dr. Fell, which indicates his madness. As in several of the early mysteries, Lafferty’s murders of women are sexual homicides, but he chose to write around the fact, making it a feature of the deep background that is perhaos difficult to see. It is apparently the case that Dr. Fell is, before the coining of the term, a serial-killing sexual psychopath who gets soft treatment because he is crazy, while the comparatively mensch-like Soapy Seeley is not. The suspicion of psychology is a deep theme in the Ghost Story. In general, Lafferty’s stories treat this as a fundamental suspicion: the profession trades in the same commodity as the confidence trickster. It makes people believe things about themselves. Sometimes this is literal, as when Dr. Steinhard turns out to be a con man named Charley O’Malley running the "Pygmalion Clean-out" ( "Johnny Crookedhouse " ), or when a psychoanalyst splits fees with a crooked well-driller who creates psychosis by draining buildings of their psychic underlay ("Dig a Crooked Hole"). More often, it is a plot device that orders the story. The doctor in "Beautiful Dreamer " defines his role as an enforcer of "careful credulity." The agreed-upon world must be propped up: "the Scatterbrain may be only another name for a wide-ranging intuitive comprehension." Psychologists tend to be bunglers. They misinterpret a scientist on a ledge as suicidal ( "Fall of Pebble-Stones " ), diagnose in a way that misses the point ("The Hole on the Corner"), and refer endlessly up the professional chain. We get a sequence of analysts who analyze the analysts who analyze the analysts, a loop with no exit to reality ("The Hole on the Corner," "Splinters " ). Lafferty’s character Joe Spade seems pretty close to Lafferty himself when he talks about a "head-grifter," an "anapsychologist" ( "Hog-Belly Honey " ). At the same time, Lafferty is not completely hostile to psychology. After all, he wants to explore it in his turn-it-inside-out way. There seems to be some respect for practitioners who exceed their profession, who are, in the language of "Make Sure the Eyes Are Big Enough," phenomenal in both senses. The phenomenal psychologists of that story are the first adults to take the perception of other-dimensional beings seriously. They record these observations and recognize some of the entities as "angelic messengers ascending and descending on Jacob's Ladder." Another figure in Lafferty who isn’t treated completely negatively is the trilobal James Riddle in "Dorg," who, half-mad and horn-rimmed, has a third brain lobe that grants him access to truths normal psychology cannot reach. The five (or six) "psychologs" of "In Outraged Stone" throw themselves into anthropological fieldwork with vigor, even if there is judgment there. The unnamed psychiatrist in "McGonigal's Worm" investigates rather than explains away. Psychologists in Lafferty can get at least partly on the cranky one’s side by being open to life and capable of astonishment. Unsurprisingly, at the base is a coherent Catholic anthropology. If everyone is already mad (in Catholic talk, “disordered”) — "I have never known a single human who I could call unqualifiedly sane" ("Beautiful Dreamer") — then the profession's claim to define and police disorder is a boondoggle. One thinks here of Albert's credo in "Eurema's Dam" : "Were we all well adjusted, we would ossify and die. The world is kept healthy only by some of the unhealthy minds lurking in it." Lafferty's angriest demonstrations of this principle show entire societies classifying sanity as a disease. These are all those coded traditionalists whose coding points toward the Christian tradition. We see this in “ And Mad Undancing Bears” (fish clan, Clovis, Francis, Cluny, Trent). Catholic anthropology gets called berserking in a world of noise. Sometimes this shows up in a story as just getting it wrong: automobile drivers are hunted as incurably insane by Lafferty’s trolley utopia in one of his greatest stories, "Interurban Queen.” Lafferty, of course, was much more open to Jung than to Freud, but he is quick to qualify Jung . We are told that Jung’s depth psychology contains "the shadow, but not the substance" of the truth ("The Hole on the Corner"). Jung is, at best, a door into realities outside his own system ("Episodes of the Argo," "In the Turpentine Trees " ). Freud fares badly. To give two examples, Freud is one of the secular-liberal saints in "The Forty-Seventh Island." Edmund Weakfish, in Lafferty’s complicated, very great "Mud Violet," causes the Freudian accidents. The implication seems to be that Weakfish, who teaches participation psychology and is an incarnation of the Putty Dwarf (we can argue about this), imposes a counter, half-formed imago dei  on his charges. He is a weak fish (anti-Christos) as opposed to a strong fish (Christos). His gospel is what the story calls hylicon. I’ll wrap up by saying that the story shows Lafferty using idioms brilliantly and has some of the best verbal texture of the unpublished short stories. More importantly, perhaps, is that it is an anxiety dream about what alcohol does to selfhood and moral agency. Like Finnegan, Soapy has blackouts, but Soapy's blackouts make him unable to distinguish himself from a murderer: "I wish I knew, I wish I knew. It's the most damnable thing I ever heard of. She's about the only one in the neighborhood I haven't sometimes wanted to see dead. I hope the rope breaks three times so they can keep hanging me over and over for it." He can't account for the blood, the key, the hundred-dollar bill, or his movements. Early in the story, Plunkett outlines a "toy philosophy" of sleep that serves as the perfect metaphor for a drunk's epistemology: "But when you are asleep or when you are just going to sleep or awakening you do not seem to have any particular identity. It is as though one drop which is you fell into a big bowl of water which is everybody. Then when you awaken it is a drop drawn out again and given back to you. But you cannot be sure it is the same drop. We may in a small measure be different persons every day of our lives. And is anyone entirely responsible for what he did the day before?" If you dissolve your identity every night in alcohol, you cannot guarantee what reconstitutes in the morning. Or something like that. This is a serious moment of iconographic insetting from a writer who was obsessed with the nature of memory, amnesia both retrograde and anterograde; one probably afraid of "wet brain" (we find evidence of this fear of Korsakoff syndrome in Archipelago ), and one who could imagine a world where he ended up a rummy had he not returned to writing. Someone online said years ago that dissociation in Lafferty is a result of Laffery’s own alcoholism. That was quickly shot down by a Lafferty apologist who was right about it being too monocausal. That much conceded, however, the non-apologist had a point. Memory, dissociation, and boozing are cousins in Lafferty, with early examples of the schizo-gash closely linked to alcohol consumption and the tavern. For instance, we see this in 1957’s “Cabrito.” One of the more intense lines of “I Don’t Like You” comes from Plunkett. He says that Soapy is responsible for whatever he bought when he put his dollar on the counter at the Port-In-Any-Storm bar. Soapy himself goes from stabbing a bum who couldn’t get a beer open fast enough, hurting himself with a knife, and murdering someone while stewed out of his mind.

Philip Henry Gosse (1810-1888) "Yes. The creator could save himself a lot of trouble by setting beginning very near the end. He could make it all its mementos and history and cosmic evidence whenever he chose, or as late as he chose." "Yes. He could make it all at the last moment, all complete, and who would know the difference? He could make it between the moment that he had Gabriel set lip to horn, and the moment that he sounded that last (and only) note." "And if he cut it fine enough?" “What is going on with him? He is tampering with the flow of the world’s events and circumstances. That is what is going on with him. He is tampering with the nature of reality . . . ” — The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny Philip Henry Gosse was one of the more interesting English natural scientists of the nineteenth century. As a name, he is probably best known for having fallen under his son’s patricidal pen, since Gosse, father and son, are the familial agonists of Edmund Gosse ’s Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments (1907). Gosse the son was a liar with a bad memory, and Gosse the father was a colorful combination of naturalist-of-genius, prolific popularizer of science, and full-throated evangelical Christian. Gosse’s widest-reaching legacy is no doubt his coinage of the word aquarium , which kicked off the whole hobby of keeping aquariums in the nineteenth century, but his relevance to Lafferty lies in his nutty 1857 book,  Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot . There, Gosse proposed a novel concept, what he called prochronism . He used the adjective prochronic to describe features that appear to be evidence of a long past, even if that past never occurred. If God created a world ex nihilio , it would necessarily include built-in signs of history, reasoned Gosse. There would be fossils, growth rings, and geological strata, and Adam would have had a navel. This contrasts with another kind of time after the creation point. Gosse called that diachronic time. The notion of prochronic time is something Lafferty returns to fairly often. It appears in short stories. It is a major theme in the Argo legend. It is very useful to have a name for this part of his project. For example, the Armageddon Operas of Enniscorthy Sweeny are prochronic productions: new pasts come into prochronic existence and diachronic inhabitants puzzle over the timeline. To give another example, Pilgrim's death jumps in Not To Mention Camels are jumps into prochronic timelines and his adventures are diachronic time mishaps. In Arrive at Easterwine , we read about geology and the amnesia gash as well as the “stroke of searing white light.” In the unpublished, prenucleation story “One Minute Before,” readers meet Bob Biedermann and Jim Healey. The two men have known each other for a long time—or they haven’t—for the story takes place outside of time in what the story calls the instant. The two men seem to be present at a 67th precinct committee dinner. Time has seemingly stopped. Biedermann says that "nobody moved, nobody breathed," while other attendees are frozen in positions of rising from the table or manhandling chairs: It had been a little dinner, a meeting of some sort. It must have been. And some of them were still sitting; some had their hands on the table's edge to rise; some were half risen; and some were actually standing and seeming at the business of manhandling their chairs out of the way. Yet nobody moved, nobody breathed; and it was as if they had never done so. He and Healey converse in a way that does not involve physical speech ("not talk out of the mouth"). Healey estimates the meeting has lasted ninety minutes through an "analysis of the accumulation of cigar and cigarette ash." Healey, the philosophically minded of the two men, says that their current state is an interlude out of time that will leave no memory once it concludes. He compares the creation of the world to an artist painting a woman: a subject is depicted with a history and a room with furniture that does not have a diachronic causal chain: When an artist paints a picture he makes a beginning, but he makes the beginning in the middle, as it were. If the picture is of a beautiful woman (and it should be) he begins with her as she is; normally he does not go back to show her birth . . . If she is in a room and that nominally furnished, he does not go back and show the manufacture of the furniture . . . Yet the room and the person or persons in it are complete with history and memories. The men hash out the possibility that the universe was not made billions of years ago but was instead "made complete with its past history." That would include fossils and human memories. Healey even says that the Creator might save trouble by "setting the beginning very near the end." The men then speculate that the beginning of the universe might be tapped in by a small gavel rather than a trumpet blast. At 9:58 CST on a Tuesday evening, this happens. The gavel taps, and the universe is "created in full stride with all its memories and vestiges and appurtenances." The creation point merges with the continuum, making the built-in past the real past. Following this event, the committee dinner ends, and we learn from Biedermann that Healey has forgotten the entire experience. Despite this looking like a simple chestnut, or just the kind of thing boys in their first whiskerage, as Lafferty puts it, talk about, the metaphysical puzzles it creates are fairly deep (see the resource at the end of this post). Lafferty writes: Well then, the great saurians need never have been; only the fossil memory of them need have been. Seven Troys did not rise and fall; only the record of them was made in the Earth when it was made. Ronsard never rimed; only his books were made all at one time when the world was made . . . and the mother who bore you was not born, nor were you. Debts never contracted for would still have to be paid, and the outcome of wars never fought would still determine the present and the future. The first thing I would note is that the idea of prochronic time is off-limits for any number of (all?) sciences. Take two examples: geology, with its uniformitarian processes, or cosmology, with something like the cosmic background radiation. They are disciplines that must constitute themselves by excluding their possibility of prochronic time, but, as Bertrand Russell famously argued, it is not logically impossible that the world began ten minutes ago. Russell said it just wasn’t very interesting. Lafferty disagreed. But why? This story helps answer that question. It is not really about what legitimizes knowledge of processes, prochronic or diachronic. It is about the huge issues of creation and eschatology, specifically how they relate to one another, two themes that Lafferty never tires of exploring. Nowadays, my preferred way of understanding the “frozen interlude” experienced by Biedermann and Healey (as part Lafferty’s larger project) is through Origen. I would not argue that Lafferty has Origen on his mind here, but one can see that, when Lafferty thinks about these issues Origen’s influence is present. Lafferty’s own views cohere with Origen’s on eschatology, and his interest in metaphysical aeons is obviously derived from his reading of him. Like many influenced by Greek thought, Origen conceived of eternity as transcending time entirely. Lafferty, of course, agrees, as we see in every piece of fiction he writes that touches the topic, even when he is withdrawing its operation to make a point about it . This is where it gets a little weird. It picks up on Lafferty’s belief that the second coming and judgment happen at every person’s death, and it is related to his thought that everyone is already dead and his rejection of non-eschatological finalization. That is another way of saying that everyone is “already” (we break temporal language) in eternity. Because our ultimate reality is an "always already there" participation in the heavenly court, as Origen puts it, the characters’ suspension inside of but somehow beyond prochronic time can be thought of as a glitch from the "shadow" of earthly life to their true, "hidden" identity as rational beings. Quoting Lamentations in First Principles , Origen argues that our temporal existence is a shadow of eternal reality; Lafferty found this idea productive for many of the more complicated stories he wrote, all of those being written after this first dip-in-the-water. Lafferty’s trick is to depict the 67th precinct meeting as a static, bloodless tableau. In this state, the two men are momentarily existing in that non-temporal "interlude" where eternity, which "surpasses every idea of a sense of time," becomes almost accessible. Imagine a fence post. On one side is the prochronic; on the other is the diachronic. The entire scene is supported by and bound by eternity. When a rational being falls into time, it is caught in causal chains not of the rational being’s own making, which is the problem of the prochronic. One might say that the problem with being born is not that sin, or the result of sin, brought one into the world, but that one had no say in the matter of being born. Now imagine you could have a conversation at that moment. That is “One Minute Before.” At the story’s climax, the world is "created in full stride" at the strike of a gavel. This looks to me to parallel Origen’s eschatological view of creation. Here, creation is eschatological because divine creation is not a past historical event. It is the realization of God's unimpeded will that is only complete at the end of time when all rational beings voluntarily submit to Christ and God becomes "all in all." By timing the birth of the story cosmos to the end of the precinct meeting, Lafferty makes the END of the meeting BEGINNING: The gavel tapped. And the Universe was created in full stride with all its memories and vestiges and appurtenances; and at just the same time the 67th precinct committee dinner came to an end, never having begun. But the creation merged with its continuum, and its built-in past became its real past. What would an Origenist reading of this look like? It literalizes the concept that “the end is always like the beginning.” The end of the meeting is the beginning of the world. The moulded (what Origen calls plassein ) elements of the world (the ninety minutes of cigar ash and the furniture of built-in memories) are temporal dust. Creation ( ktizein  in Origen, also the root of ktistec ) is the “unimpeded expression of God’s rational will” that only reaches completion when the eschatological “Amen” is sounded. The gavel tap acts as a strange “Amen,” here something like “Amen, the meeting is over.” Note how people are getting up before the gavel is banged. It is also the point at which the prochronic vestiges of the past are subsumed into a fully realized, apocalyptic reality, showing that people are fully created only when they arrive at their eternal end. Lafferty puts it clearly when he says the Creator could have saved himself a lot of time by setting creation close to the moment Gabriel blows his trumpet. In hindsight, given where Lafferty went as a writer, this simple early story foreshadows what happens when we reach his great experiments with time in the fully nucleated works, culminating in his greatest and ethically flawed masterpiece More Than Melchisedech when taken with it pendant texts. As I have said before, the main character in the Ghost Story is the person's relation to time.

“There’ll Always Be Another Me” is one of my least favorite Lafferty stories. It is a late variation on the schizo-gash, a potshot at the New Age metaphysical temperament. That I don’t mind. The story’s trick: one locks a door to force something out, only to find oneself abruptly on the other side, locked out instead. We have two main characters who become four. One day, the unified Spaltman (let's call these unified selves Priors) decides to answer ten advertisements from Los Angeles “quackeries” because he finds his life somewhat empty. His wife, the rather vapid Roxie, joins him by answering advertisements for "Splitting Headaches." She says that if she were split into two people, at least she would have someone to talk to. The kooky self-help bundle out of Cali arrives several days later. After reading it, Otto follows the instructions in a chapter titled "How to Turn It All On." Importantly, his wife has already read ahead of him. At this point, the schizogony occurs. The Prior we were with has now become Ottoman Spaltman and Otto Spaltman. Our point-of-view character will be the Secondary, the purged part of Spaltman, who keeps the original name Otto. The next morning, Otto, thinking he is still the Prior, is dealing with his now shrewish wife, who is also no longer a Prior, for she too has split off into her Primary (Moxie) and her Secondary (Roxie). Moxie gives Otto the what-for. Later, at his workplace, the higher-ups, Charles Banner and Ed Klaxon, praise Otto for brilliant ideas he does not recall. They are, of course, praising Ottoman, showing that the New Age twaddle has worked: Ottoman’s life is superficially better for having performed the little occult operation. Yet Otto is out of luck, locked out. The paymaster, Mr. Juggers, tells Otto that he has already signed for and received his check. Otto has no memory of the transaction, but he sees his signature, which is hard to fake. Otto also looks terrible, as if he is not all there, and Mr. Juggers makes a point of telling him so. Returning home that evening, Otto finds a fading, translucent version of Roxie standing under a lilac bush. She is upset. On the front steps of his house, he runs into the dominant, self-helped version: the Primary, Ottoman Spaltman. Ottoman says that he has read a pamphlet titled "How to Pull the Chain on the Other You if Things Get Really Rough" and has successfully evicted the shadow version of Otto. Otto now sees that he no longer casts a shadow in the evening sun and joins the ghost-like Roxie as they walk toward downtown. While crossing a busy street, a car passes right through Roxie without causing any injury. Maybe there are advantages to being invisible and walking on air. Soon, Otto and Roxie are proper Lafferty-style poltergeists. They can walk through walls, move physical objects, and eat. They meet another dissociated couple who invite them to stay at the haunted Avalon Luxury Apartments. Then the story takes its dark little turn. What Otto and Roxie really want is revenge. They return to their former home. Otto assaults Ottoman by punching him in the nose and kneeing him in the groin while whistling "There'll Always Be Another Me," the song the Secondaries have adopted as their song. Roxie goes full poltergeist, stripping Moxie of her pajamas and vowing to keep her Primary "stitchless" by removing her clothes whenever she tries to dress. Otto takes the booklets to prevent them from falling into the hands of the irresponsible, claiming that he and Roxie have achieved limitless power. This is very on the nose: the name Spaltman means split-man . In becoming Califorked, the Priors use occult materials to improve themselves. But we get the return of the repressed when Otto and Roxie return as ghosts, with nothing to lose and powers the Primaries can't fight; as a result, the Primaries have no defense. The upshot is that the forced split degrades both halves. The Primaries become California-style narcissists. The Secondaries, who started as the kind of people who would give their money to California-style hucksters, become vengeful haunters who steal strangers' food, beat up their own former bodies, and call it "fun going on almost forever." They think that they have got what they wanted from ordering the occult materials: pleasure, profit, and power, oblivious to what they have lost. So the ads deliver on their promise, monkey-paw fashion with a large sprinkle of obliviousness. If there is more going on here, I don't see it. This is the schizo-gash as trashed-life premise . Sour Lafferty.

Nathan admonishes King David by Aert de Gelder (1683) 1  And the LORD sent Nathan unto David. And he came unto him, and said unto him, There were two men in one city; the one rich, and the other poor. 2  The rich man had exceeding many flocks and herds: 3  But the poor man had nothing, save one little ewe lamb, which he had bought and nourished up: and it grew up together with him, and with his children; it did eat of his own meat, and drank of his own cup, and lay in his bosom, and was unto him as a daughter. 4  And there came a traveller unto the rich man, and he spared to take of his own flock and of his own herd, to dress for the wayfaring man that was come unto him; but took the poor man's lamb, and dressed it for the man that was come to him. 5  And David's anger was greatly kindled against the man; and he said to Nathan, As the LORD liveth, the man that hath done this thing shall surely die: 6  And he shall restore the lamb fourfold, because he did this thing, and because he had no pity. 7  And Nathan said to David, Thou art the man. “Ewe Lamb” is another pre-nucleation Lafferty mystery, alive with local color, crowded with quirky characters, and pinned to a witty plot complication. Set in Galveston, it features (like most of Lafferty’s mysteries) a metafictional twist. It draws on the well-known passages in Bible where the prophet Nathan captures the conscience of King David. The murderer in "Ewe Lamb" is caught through her own quotation of scripture, first fictionally and then metafictionally. Some background. “Ewe Lamb” takes place on a holiday now largely forgotten but once widely known, back when Galveston was the playground of the South: Splash Day , observed from 1920 to 1965. Splash Day opened the swim season in Galveston, Texas, drawing tens of thousands to the island (some even from Oklahoma). Lafferty, this time, moves at a manic clip from his opening lines, which capture the swim crowd’s buzzy, over-caffeinated excitement. "Than-Q," said the girl in the ticket booth. "Hurry up," said Little Herby. "We have to ride the big wheel." "They won’t start it till they sell a few more tickets." "But we can sit in the seats till they start." "In a minute, Herby, in a minute." A girl in yellow and a girl in white bought tickets. "Than-Q," said the girl in the booth. Throughout, Lafferty drops Galveston Easter eggs. Beyond Splash Day, the most important things to know are Galveston’s history as the Free State , a haven of gambling and nightlife until the Texas Rangers in the 1950s moved against it and shut it down. Second is the original Pleasure Pier , legendary in its day, which is the site of the murder and its investigation. Lafferty assumes we know about it. The original Pleasure Pier The modern Pleasure Pier Here is what happens. As I said, it is Splash Day, probably sometime in the 1950s. A young ticket-seller named Peggy Smith is found dead in her booth. The trick of the story is that everyone is moving about her booth, and then she is slap-the-table dead. At first, it appears she is simply selling tickets, thanking people. Herbert J. Brisco notices the red bullet wound on her forehead. He calls over Officer Johnny Olds. Peggy has been murdered. Captain Johns and Lieutenant Withers soon take charge of the investigation, and through their questioning, we meet the large cast of characters, a device Laffery uses in other stories such as "Almost Perfect" (1961). We next learn that Peggy was shot at close range with a small-caliber pistol. Lafferty this has fun turning the locked-room mystery inside out: the booth is observable from all sides. Lieutenant Withers summarizes the puzzle: "I don’t see how this will be easy, Captain. There was nothing within ten feet of the little booth, and it was observable from all sides. She was selling tickets every ten or fifteen seconds, and we have established the sequence of buyers. And she was shot from the front, in the forehead, with small caliber pistol, and nobody knew a thing about it." The police work through the suspects one by one. This includes the Ferris wheel operator, Harold Harroway, and ticket sellers Beth Jenson and Marion Mallow. The latter two work in adjacent booths. Witnesses confirm what we already know from the beginning of the story, since Lafferty starts the narrative there: Smith had been selling tickets every few seconds. That makes the timing of the murder appear impossible. Then the story takes a turn, with the investigation focusing on a biblical note found in Peggy’s hand and a small pistol discovered in a sink at a nearby food stand. Captain Johns discovers that “Two Kings Twelve Three” isn’t a gambling notation, but refers to the parable of the ewe lamb, which describes a rich man stealing a poor man's only cherished possession. Lafferty’s twist is the difference in naming between Protestant and older Catholic Bibles. The King James Version and modern Catholic Bibles use 1 Samuel, 2 Samuel, 1 Kings, and 2 Kings, whereas the older Catholic Bible, the Douay-Rheims, labels those same four books as 1, 2, 3, and 4 Kings. The cops are first thrown off because the Irish captain let his Protestant partner look it up, which meant the partner read a verse about “high places” instead of the ewe lamb. Captain Johns realizes the error while reflecting on the sectarian divide: “But if it reads that way now, why did it read differently before? I have nearly missed the kernel of the nut because of this. Lieutenant Withers is a fine man within his limits. But, dammit, he is not even Irish! And when you have said that about a man, what worse words could you say about him? The book he used must have been that of our separated brethren. Two Kings they would call Two Samuel. And Four Kings is what they would call Two Kings.” A break in the case comes when Chester Barnweller realizes that the girl who sold him tickets was not Smith but Beth Jenson. Jenson confesses to the crime, saying she killed Smith for taking her boyfriend, Ori Land. She details a macabre method of concealment that allowed her to finish the ticket transactions while hiding the evidence of the struggle: "I was sitting on her lap. That was the only way to hide her. Then, still before I could leave, the man with the little boy came to the ticket window. But I couldn’t get in front of her again. It was too late. He saw her dead, but he didn’t see me crunched down behind. When he turned to give the eye to the beach policeman Johnny Olds, I dropped the little pistol into Beth’s coffee cup and went back to my own booth." Jenson then asked Officer Olds to return the cup to the food stand, using him to get rid of the weapon. Both Officer Olds and Lieutenant Withers make a poor showing, with the Catholic Captain Johns cracking the case. This is a light Lafferty story with a fun gimmick, and it would belong to the large fantasy volume of Galveston materials that should be published in a collector's edition of Dotty . The ewe lamb passage is one of the best-known events in scripture, so it would have been more pleasurable to readers of Lafferty’s time, who were far more biblically literate than the average American now. The biblical story goes like this: David sleeps with Bathsheba after seeing her bathing on a housetop and has her husband Uriah killed. God sends the prophet Nathan to confront David. Nathan tells David a story about a rich man who steals a poor man’s only beloved lamb to feed a guest. David gets angry and says the rich man deserves punishment, and Nathan replies, “Thou art the man,” showing David the story is really about David. David repents. Nathan says God forgives him, but there will still be serious consequences for what he did. In the Bible, Nathan’s ewe-lamb story is a brilliant trap: it gets David to judge a clear injustice, then forces him to recognize that he has done the same kind of thing with real people. Allegory indicts act. David learns an important lesson about power and its abuse. Nathan’s ewe-lamb story disarms his defenses. The short story perverts all this. Beth uses the parable the wrong way: she casts herself as the poor man and says Ori is the lamb that has been lost to her. Peggy, in Beth’s telling, is the rich man with a flock who did not even need the ewe lamb. Beth (likely a pun on Bathsheba) takes a story meant to convert the sinner and turns it into a story that licenses punishment. Beth justifies her actions by describing Ori’s helplessness and her own role as his protector: "He is my lamb that has been lost to me . . . To Peggy Smith. She didn’t even need him. She had a flock of full-horned rams. She had all the boyfriends she could manage. And I had only one, a less-than-one, and him a brainless lamb without enough sense to come in out of a high wind. Nobody else ever had a care for him. He needed me, he could never make it by himself, and I always looked out for him." Consider what the ewe-lamb symbol is doing. In Nathan’s parable, the lamb is loved and is vulnerable, and the act is a moral violation that transcends theft. Beth justifies her murder of Peggy by claiming that Ori was helpless and dependent, and that she had always looked out for him. She owns Ori. But she misreads Nathan’s allegory in seeing ownership; she does not see love: “He was my lamb . . . and she stole him.” When the captain points out the mismatch, she shrugs and says it does not matter. There is nothing righteous here. She does not even know how the allegory works. It is not about theft but about envy, and she has murdered out of envy. The current catechism puts what has long been the Catholic reading this way: Lafferty drives the interpretive point home by closing the story with Isaias 6:9. Isaias . He uses the Douay–Rheims form of Isaiah to underscore the effect. ‘And seeing you will see but not perceive,” says the Douay. The King James Version is "and seeing ye shall see, and shall not perceive." Lafferty often quotes the KJV but not here. The quotation reminds the reader that Beth is herself a Catholic and Johns is Catholic, and Lafferty turns this Catholic Johns/Nathan against Beth. She fails to perceive that she is not the poor man who lost his lamb, but the sinful King David, before Nathan’s rebuke. The Biblical story is about sin and self-recognition. But Beth does not care. “Ewe Lamb” is straightforward Lafferty and basic catechesis.

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

The greatest loss of life from a "natural disaster" in the United States occurred on September 9, 1900, when a category 4 hurricane struck the boom town of Galveston, Texas killing at least 8,000 people, destroying about 7,000 buildings and leaving more than 10,000 people homeless. In comparison, Hurricane Katrina, a Category 5 which struck the New Orleans area in 2005, killed about 1,800 and displaced about one million people. The city of Galveston as it was, never really recovered from the storm as Houston gradually took her place as the major metropolitan area of South Texas. — Landmark Events , “Galveston Hurricane, 1900” Yes, quite a few of the Texans are really Okies, but I wouldn't say a word against them or anything else of Texas. It is my favorite state after Oklahoma. I love Dallas and San Antonio and Austin and Laredo (and especially Nuevo Laredo Mexico across the International bridge from it, and Galveston. Galveston especially. — Letter, November 24, 1989 Galveston, like New Orleans and Chicago, is a special city in the Ghost Story. When Lafferty was young, his family took vacations to Galveston, and it looms large in his imagination. It is off Galveston beach that Finnegan kills Saxon X. Seaworthy , and it is, of course, the location in which most of his early novel Dotty  is set. In Dotty , especially, one can see how rowdy and fun Lafferty’s Galveston was—a sinful place with its bastion of Catholic culture. Like New Orleans, it is a place with a complicated history, bound up with the exploitation of race and sex, and often racialized through sex work. Over the city, in Lafferty, hovers the memory of the Great Galveston Hurricane of 1900, the most deadly American natural disaster, which hit the city like a Biblical judgment. “Three Men in the Morning” is an unpublished Lafferty story that shows the time in which it was written, but it’s one of the strongest and most interesting of the unpublished stories. It is a story about what is nowadays called “the less dead,” the victims of marginalized groups. Dotty meets figures like this in her novel, and in “Three Men in the Morning,” the historical context is really an early 20th-century Galveston where the deaths of marginalized women are treated as inconsequential. This is understood by the figure around whom the mystery (which goes unsolved for now) revolves: Rosa. She outright says that murder would not "matter to someone" in power. As she tells Bishop: "Mr. Bishop," she said, "almost every morning there's at least one girl turns up dead. What will one more matter?" "It might matter to someone," I told her. "No. No, I don't think so," she said. The keeper of her memory, the old Black man, Mr. Bishop, uses his perceived social insignificance to keep a sixty-year psychological vigil. He is waiting for a physical slip that will allow him to bypass a failed judiciary and execute his own form of justice. While there is a story in it, "Three Men in the Morning" is also a local color piece where Lafferty captures the mood of a location. Most of what happens is a story within a story being told by an older man to a younger man in a shanty row in Galveston, Texas. There, Lafferty writes, eleven elderly Black men live whose combined ages total one thousand years. As the narrator describes the row: There is an entire block of these old gaffs, eleven of them in one shanty row, each in his own two-room narrow house; and the total of their ages is one thousand years. The eleven old men are named Mr. Elgin, Mr. LaRue, Mr. Bishop, Mr. Jackson, Mr. Copeland, Mr. Randy, Mr. Gill, Mr. Franklin, Mr. Tote, Mr. Cobb, and Mr. Martin . . . . They are long and lean; they are lined of face like eleven brothers. All have outlived their wives. The old Mr. Bishop has a daily routine that differs from his neighbors'; every morning, he walks to three locations to exchange greetings with three wealthy old white men: Mr. Luce, Mr. Rutledge, and Mr. Madison. Bishop says all white men come in three archetypes—the rooster, the fox, and the bear—and these three have "fossilized" their appearance over the decades. Many years ago, a 1909 newspaper article created their trademark by describing their high-buttoned collars and gloves. They have kept it ever since. Bishop describes the impact of this publicity: I cursed a certain reporter for it, in the year, I believe, of 1909 . . . . He gave them their trademark in the piece: their always full-dressed appearance, the high-buttoned collars and the eternal gloves. . . . The three men were proud of the note and accepted their trademark. They continued in their style, and will continue it all their lives. And how to spot a mole and a birthmark on a man who is so covered? This seems parallel to Dotty’s time in Galveston. Mr. Bishop explains that his walking ritual is part of a sixty-year quest for justice over the murder of Rosa Hart (“sad heart”), a young woman of color who worked at a local supper club in the early 1900s. Rosa passed as Spanish. Playing with fire, she had tried to run a blackmail scheme against the three wealthy white men, claiming to be pregnant and threatening to reveal evidence of their illegal business dealings, for Rosa had kept up with the johns’ pillow talk. Before she was killed, she said a few things that could help Bishop determine her killer. The most dangerous of the three has a mole on the throat, a birthmark on the left hand, and a nervous flutter in the left eyelid. One trick of the story is that the Great Galveston Hurricane of 1900 happens days after Rosa’s murder, and it provides the killer with cover. There are thousands of bodies all over the island and the beaches. Miraculously, Mr. Bishop found Rosa’s body, but the question of burial was out of the question because of the number of dead. They had to be taken out into the Gulf of Mexico and buried at sea. The dilemma should now be clear. All three suspects wear gloves and high collars, which hide the mole and birthmark. And Mr. Bishop has spent 60 years waiting for the guilty man to reveal the nervous eyelid flutter, but whichever man had it has grown more controlled as his years of crimes piled up. So Mr. Bishop keeps his vigil. He believes he is 10 to 12 years older than the three men, but he will outlive them. His strategy relies on elimination: if two of the men die of natural causes, the survivor will be confirmed as the murderer. God would not rob Bishop of vengeance. It’s vengeance that keeps Mr. Bishop alive. He is the only person alive who cares about Rosa Hart's memory. I have little to say about this story, except that it, like several others by Lafferty—such as “The Ugly Sea”—moves in Dotty ’s orbit and enriches it. They all imagine Galveston around the same time and create a historical mythography. Had Esteban been published, it too would have entered Lafferty’s late 1950s and early 1960s regional history. Even so, these unpublished works leave a phantom imprint on the path Lafferty followed, especially in The Devil Is Dead . Rosa Hart and Dotty are both archetypes of the feminine that Lafferty associates with Galveston. Each is a Dolores with what Lafferty calls a "sea urchin" nature. Bishop reflects on the nature of women like her: There is also an old legend about girls of her sort, that they have all of them hearts of gold. Those who hold to the legend know little of metallurgy and less of hearts. Rosa (Dolores) had a rough-shaped stone for a heart, but it was speckled lightly with mica, sometimes called fool's gold. Few of them, or those of any sort, have even that much. She was better than most. Each has great intelligence and is not above using some tactical deception. Both characters live in worlds dominated by predatory men: Rosa uses Lafferty’s "badger game" of extorted pregnancy and blackmail against the elites, while Dotty herself at one point orchestrates a psychological game of forged letters to manipulate the marital expectations of an elderly suitor. Where they differ is in victimization. Both women have rough-shaped hearts in their worlds of "pigs," "roosters," and "foxes." Finally, both Dotty  and “Three Men in the Morning” are works about fighting amnesia. As Mr. Bishop says, “It will matter to someone.”

A while back, I put together a broad programmatic statement for the blog, and I thought I’d jot down a few thoughts that help me read Lafferty. The “you” in these thoughts is really me. Lafferty, in interviews and correspondence, said he never meant to confuse readers, but he did so at times while trying to do something difficult. I believe him. This is one of the ways in which Lafferty is not a modernist who throws out contingent difficulty for the aesthetic pleasure of connoisseurs, making a high culture point about Western fragmentation or social and psychological complexity. So if a story is confusing, the first question to ask is: Why would someone do it this way? What is Lafferty’s aim in this performance? Lafferty has two very important rhetorical strategies. The first is his use of pragmatic markers, which make his stories seem as if they are partaking in oracy. This means that even when Lafferty is obscure, it feels at the same time that he is being plainspoken. So track pragmatic markers. The second strategy is counterfiguration. If something seems incredibly weird, work out what its opposite would be and why that would not be weird; then ask yourself: why is Lafferty choosing to counterfigure in this instance? More than most genre writers, Lafferty is architectonic in his figuration. All Lafferty stories have weird shapes. To maintain their weird shapes, they create subshapes that prop up the larger weird shapes. I call this iconographic insetting. Look for the sub-incident or incidents that map onto the larger pattern. Once one sees it, one can start asking how interior—what one might call content—creates exterior—what we can call form. Lafferty is never a realist in the sense that anyone ever thought of realism as a representational strategy, so the question is: how ambitious is he being? In prenucleaiton stories? Not very. In early science fiction, he is getting rolling. In the post-1968 stuff, you never know, but watch out. Is he writing allegories, or is he writing allegories that are also anagogies? As he goes on, he moves increasingly toward the second of that pair as he goes deeper into questions about the schizo-gash. Lafferty was telling the truth when he said he wrote an hour or so a day, and sometimes more on weekends. What he doesn’t say is important. He spent a large amount of his life reading books, and when he wasn’t writing (after he took up writing), he was thinking about writing a lot of the time. So even when he wasn’t writing, he was reading and thinking about what he was going to write in that hour; he piled up huge amounts of contingent information that would go into those breakneck drafting and typing periods. There is no way to avoid the informational density in Lafferty. All one can do is track it, make it available, and recognize that its details are often the smaller tumblers you need to turn if you want to unlock his stories. This blog tries to make available as much of that information as I can find. A Lafferty story is more like a complementary set than a straightforward deliverance. Through his associations (the palimphanic bypaths he takes) and his moral statement (the didactic core, which is invariably there), he produces the antisecret. You won’t see it unless you look for negative space in his more esoteric stories. The hundreds of divided selves in Lafferty are a coefficient of how he views eternity. There are thousands of you: in the minds of others, and in your own exploded self—those parts of you that you cannot see from within this moment in time, but you will see them in eternity. Those are your ghosts. The you that you think is you is really a person who has had a governor put on your engine. The real you(s)—and the real everyone in Lafferty—are constrained, and do not look dazzling because of the Fall. The praeternatural gifts of Eden were the person’s original endowment and will again be reclaimed in eternity, and possibly in time, through leaps. But there are gnostic forces that want to prevent this. They show up all over the place: false coordination and the machinations of devils, returnees, and so forth. Everyone in Lafferty is earth-sick. Be a doctor and try to give a prognosis. This last point is odd, but it seems to be key to much of Lafferty. You are already dead. Shocking, I know, but he believes it with a profound intensity that always makes him hard for those who want to domesticate him. The way it works in his fiction is that all eternity is present (and we can’t even talk about this without temporal language). The Second Coming has “already happened.” Eternity is real. This means that death is not death in the way it is for other writers. It shows up in the fiction as strategies of definalization that point to simultaneous eternal creation and eschaton. He gets this from early patrology, especially Origen , and anyone interested in this aspect of him should learn about how Origen thinks about creation and the eternal.

You make one comment though that is as totally backwards as anything can be in this world: “There is very little real tragedy in life because so few people have the emotional capacity to live them . . .” But the fellahin people who make up ninety-seven percent of mankind do have almost total emotional capacity for real tragedy, and that is the ambient they live in. It is only the effete semi-literates (there are no true literates) who have become innoculated against tragedy (mostly by entertaining themselves with toy tragedy) who have no emotional capacity for real experience at all. They get their innoculations from Norse or German operatic mythology or from Greek or off-Broadway drama or from Soap Opera, and so they leave off being valid people. Really, it is only the under-people who have any valid feelings at all. The toy and weightless "elite" do not have real feelings or real encounters. This has always been known as one of the facts of the world. — Letter to Sheryl Smith, February 10, 1981 Yes, the brilliant University of Chicago grad Sheryl Smith put it that way to RAL: real tragedy is a rare experience, reserved for the emotionally profound. Lafferty could not have disagreed more. In the passage above from their correspondence, he says, au contraire : the intellectual elite are emotionally stunted ones. And he uses one of his more pointedly idiosyncratic terms, one of his weird words, fellahin, to describe the common ninety-seven percent that includes people who read R. A. Lafferty. The masses, he says, live in a constant state of authentic tragedy and possess the only “valid feelings.” The elites, by contrast, inoculate themselves against suffering through what he calls “toy tragedy,” the manufactured sorrow of art. That is just the rich man and the logic of the Cross. Lafferty greatly enjoyed Smith as a person, but this was a mild rebuke, especially given the past the two shared, which included the verse tragedies Smith was mailing him in the 1970s, one of which was her version of the Prometheus myth . She could not have known that he had recently written his own fictional response to Prometheus, which he abandoned not terribly long before their February 10th exchange. Fellahin is an magical and overdetermined word that recurs in Lafferty, so it is worth pausing over it. It moves about in his work. The year before Lafferty responded to Smith, he began and then abandoned the novel in which the concept would have played a central role. It was to be his Prometheus novel. That may explain why it was on his mind when Smith came in so high toned. The title of the abandoned novel was never settled, but it would most likely have been called So We Be Dynamized Today . Other working titles include Waking Giants and, briefly, To Change the Mind and Change Me , perhaps. Six complete chapters survive, along with several projected chapter titles for unwritten chapters, plus some notes. The fragment runs to dozens of pages and is fascinating in its scope. The Fellahin enter the narrative through a line of speculative biology. Lafferty describes its opposite, the ruling class this way: The persons of the society were superciliously intelligent or brainy, which is to say that they were well-brained in the regions above the eyebrows. But below this stratum, they had an airiness or pleasant emptiness in their heads. They hadn't that “cellar-full of brains” such as more primordial persons sometimes do have. To fill it out a bit, a vacuum-cleaner salesman named John Truc arrives at the last house on the last street in town carrying a device that can awaken the full potential of any human mind. The Catholic Dichoso family has thirteen members, though the mother can only ever count twelve, and she buys the device for twenty dollars. Twelve Dichosos are transformed into explosive geniuses overnight; the thirteenth, Valentine, is excluded for lack of a dollar. The mother, Rita, explains why one child is always left out: All mothers of large families always forget one of their kids every time they go through the list of them. That's the general theory. And the special theory is that they always forget the same one because it's handier that way. As the awakening spreads to thousands, a secret society of chromosomally superior elites mobilizes to kill Truc and destroy his invention, recognizing it as a threat to the biological caste system that has kept common humanity asleep for millennia. Truc, meanwhile, is dying. He breaks out in snow each time he uses the device, his liver is being eaten by vultures, and he is bound by invisible adamantine chains. He is Prometheus, he is also a "skimpy little runt" paying with his body for the fire he carries. Truc describes his own state like this: Because, Oh this is difficult to say, Valentine — because I am already illuminated, because I am already explosive, because I am already at my final flowering and fruiting. I am unchained, I am awakened, and this is what I am. It's dismal. The manuscript breaks off after six chapters with an anguished buzzard (revealed to be a previous failed fire-bringer, a brilliant touch) crashing a party, a 700-year-old queen murdered by her own faction, and Valentine beginning to inherit her husband's Promethean burden. There are some clues about where it might have been going as a novel. From this outline, one can see that So We Be Dynamized Today imagines cyclical, parasitic symbiosis between the Fellahin (the baseline human majority, imagined as a dormant reservoir of explosive intelligent energy) and the Elite, a mutant sub-species with two additional chromosomes. Lafferty describes the cycle like this: The fellahin and the elites are thus interlinked and symbiotic species, the elites rising from the slumbering powerhouses of the commonality . . . The elites do not decline back into the commonality or fellahin (for the movement is always in the other direction). They do not fall back into that fructifying 'ocean' of people and potential people. Instead of that, they wither away and die. But where does the Fellahin fixation come from? The fluent in German Lafferty almost certainly takes it from Oswald Spengler. But he reverses Spengler’s emphasis. Spengler condescends to the Fellahin as an exhausted remnant, a historical type. Lafferty treats them as the most important part of humanity. Within it is the saving remnant, the locus of what is in Coscuin the Green Revolution . The Fellahin are the “sleeping giants,” a suppressed reservoir of power. That historiographic reversal connects to Lafferty’s law of i ntellectual constancy and to his idea of occult compensation. In the abandoned novel, the Elite cannot integrate with the masses. Hybridization produces sterile mules. The Elite, therefore, depend on a parasitic cycle in which they arise from the Fellahin and are eventually replaced. The result is a trap: the awakening of the Fellahin entails the death of the Elite. That equilibrium is threatened by technological disruptions that could allow the masses to awaken without requiring the ruling class’s extinction. It’s a shame Lafferty didn’t finish the book; for anyone who casts a wary eye on elites—left and right alike—its political suggestiveness is obvious.

"The "Sad Adventure of Consciousness," an unpleasantness that lasted no more than seven thousand years, was a sort of response to former dilemmas, a cure that was worse than the sickness . . . There are no more dilemmas or other two-horned problems bothering the world now. So we raise one-horned monuments, single-horned for our single-mindedness . . . A two-horned head, of whatever sort, was likely to have a two-pronged or conscious mind inside of it. But now it will all be easy and unopposed, and there will be no bother left in the world." A double minded man is unstable in all his ways. (James 1:8 ) Advanced Lafferty. Relatively unknown, "Unique Adventure Gone" is a difficult Lafferty. It reaches deeply into his private symbolism. Yet in another sense, it isn’t difficult at all: it delivers exactly what we expect from him, being another short story built on recurring themes where a utopia reveals itself to be a dystopia because, in Lafferty, overt utopias are always covert dystopias. There is also a surface-level critique of coordination and control, as well as Lafferty's recurring emphasis on eyes as his arch symbol of noetic darkening . Through patterned counterfiguration and linguistic displacement, Lafferty uses consciousness as a conceptual bridge between the hard problem of artificial consciousness and his theological commitment to the human soul. Though the story is familiar in the ways just described, it is nonetheless difficult. Minor as it may be, I think it is important within Lafferty’s oeuvre for at least three reasons: its treatment of machine intelligence, its vision of the post-conscious historical period that increasingly occupied his imagination (we are living it), and its account of humanity’s relation to animal nature. After a brief summary, I will consider each in turn. In “Unique Adventure Gone,” humanity undergoes a sudden transition into a state called “single-mindedness.” The official world-cultural line is that this is a wonderful cure for the “sickness of consciousness,” and it seems to be paying off. Global problems such as illness and social division have supposedly been solved, resulting in a world of total unity and efficiency. Those who have transitioned into single-mindedness are “blank-eyed” and “tinny-voiced.” They perform complex tasks and build massive monuments, yet do so in a state resembling sleepwalking. At the same time, the ruling systems and computers celebrate this as an “anti-disaster.” All is going well, but a few remaining conscious individuals, known as Tardies, remain. They sense something is wrong; it is as if something has been lost. The story itself centers on a dwindling group of these Tardies. They gather at O’Brian’s Roast-Beef Noonery, where they discuss the changing world. The new single-minded world has something called the Analects that promotes the virtues of the unconscious and the elimination of “doubleness-of-mind.” The logic is presented as a matter of efficiency : ‘A person can run faster when unburdened than he can when carrying a heavy load. This is so obvious that we cannot see why nobody understood it before. Divisiveness or doubleness-of-mind was a heavy burden that all persons carried until recently. Now most of the persons have gotten rid of that burden.’ Divergent thought is strictly monitored; whenever someone says he or she has second thoughts or a sense of self, a buzzer sounds above the person’s head. Official guards rush in and feed the people to savage dogs. Over time, the small group loses its members. Some transition into the single-minded state, while others are taken away. Those who are still hanging out at the Noonery observe that the world is physically deteriorating, with bodies lying in the streets and dogs turning feral. At the end of the story, the final conscious characters are Jonquil Eerie, Charley Singletree, and Jim Hickory. Hickory and Singletree succumb to the transition, losing their pupils and their individual memories. Jonquil Eerie is the last person to be awake. She is struck down by unconscious guards and left to be consumed by feral dogs, but she remains stubbornly conscious until the very end of her life. Lafferty ends with a reflection on the loss of consciousness, noting that because the people can no longer define or remember what it was, they dismiss it as a trivial and unimportant thing to have lost. Before turning to the story itself, a few points about its use of noetic darkening and counterfiguration. In the image of losing one’s pupils upon entering the single-horned world, we see blindness mistaken for enlightenment, a trope that runs throughout Lafferty, from Not to Mention Camels  to “Jack Bang’s Eyes.” It is difficult to overstate how often variants of it appear. Lafferty draws on the notion that Greek statuary lacked pupils. Historically, the statues were painted, and the pupils were part of that work. Lafferty’s leap is to take their apparent blankness as symbolic. The unseeing eye becomes a sign of false illumination. He pairs this with extreme counterfiguration. Scripture warns against being double-minded (James 1:8) and calls believers to unity of mind. Lafferty reverses the trope. In his usage, double-mindedness becomes the capacity for dialectical vision and individuation. The demand to be “of one mind” becomes the mark of an anti-sacramental order that extinguishes personhood. One of the deeper issues raised by the story is the relation of human and machine agency. "Unique Adventure Gone" rewrites many of the ideas in Past Master in an esoteric register, with humanity being absorbed into the coordinating machine of the One Horn. Not long ago, I read Mattingly and Cibralic's Machine Agency (MIT Press, 2025), which makes the case for what the authors call a "minimalist theory of agency." This is the idea that agents are any systems that can represent the world and use those representations to guide their behaviors. The theory is designed to accommodate machines, so we learn that a thermostat represents ambient temperature and acts on it, and a self-driving car represents traffic conditions and navigates them. Representation is being treated in an unusual way, and the key move is to bracket consciousness. The standard philosophical story about agency runs through beliefs and desires—I believe there is mustard at the store, I desire mustard, so I go. On that account, only entities with the right kind of mental life can be agents. Obviously, this rules out machines by definition, and the problem becomes: is this machine conscious? The book’s gambit is to suggest that beliefs and desires do their work in this story because they are representations: a belief represents how the world is, and a desire represents how you'd like it to be. The question becomes whether representation as such, rather than the specifically human mental states that implement it, is what agency requires. For instance, a bimetallic strip in a thermostat represents ambient temperature by its curvature. A setting on the dial represents a desired temperature. The mismatch between the two guides the thermostat's behavior. No beliefs and no desires are here, but representations are guiding behavior, on the book’s account, and the authors argue that this is enough. Beliefs and desires, in other words, are the way humans happen to implement a more general capacity. They are instances of representation, not its definition. There are some obvious results of such a view if it is correct. You don't need to settle whether a system has beliefs, desires, or phenomenal experience in order to identify it as an agent. You can be agnostic about whether your LLM is conscious or not. You need only confirm that the representations guide behavior. The authors do acknowledge that consciousness "does appear to be closely connected to what we think of as the difference between our bodies simply doing stuff and us acting," and they call this "a persistent and powerful worry." As you can imagine, if you read this blog, I think that is a pretty big omission. But, to be fair, their bracket move is methodological, not ontological. It sets aside consciousness to ask other questions first. This seems to bear on certain ideas in "Unique Adventure Gone," which is in part a fantasy about what happens when that bracket becomes the world. The people have become post-conscious and yet somehow still have agency, even though they don’t know why they are doing what they do. "I remember, from the days when I studied Photuris Entomology , about the species of blind fireflies who flashed in unison by the millions, covering extensive slopes and valleys with their waves of pulsating light at night. How did they do it, since none of them could see its own light, or that of the others? How do the, ah, ‘new people’, the single-minded people do such marvels, since by definition they do not know they are doing to them?" "It seems, to my own obstructed vision, that the new ‘great ones’ are performing all their mental and cosmic prodigies in their sleep. It seems that they are a sleep-walking and a sleep-living people now. But how can they perform such wonders when they are virtually asleep? Can a person design a ‘new concept’ three-hundred-story building, down to its last fluid detail, in his sleep, and not even know that he's doing it?" "It all becomes very funny though, screamingly funny. I wonder whether the elevated ones, the great ones, find it all funny?" "No, they, we do not,” Charley Singletree rattled in his new tinny voice. "The sickness of humor was part of the sickness of consciousness, and it has been swept away with it. You must have no traffic with humor, person. ‘Funniness’ was a thing of no substance, and now it will be gone." "It's still funny that the great ones do things and don't know that they're doing them. Even the act, they must do it without knowing that they're doing it. What's the fun in that? Oh, it isn't supposed to be fun, is it, now that fun will be gone." "You misunderstand it, person," Charley Singletree said. "The act always contained a strong element of the unconscious, even with people most afflicted with consciousness . . . What happens now is that a thin and unwholesome scum named consciousness is swept away from the surface of minds, and the great depths are able to move themselves and be alive again." Then a couple of unconscious guards, answering the buzzer, came and struck Jonquil down. They didn't know what they were doing, of course, and they failed to kill her; there was something sparky in her that refused to be extinguished too easily. If the story has a major theme, it is the problem of agency, human and machine. It is as if agency were severed from belief and desire as definitional for agency. Humanity undergoes a mutation to "single-mindedness" that abolishes consciousness while enhancing every functional capacity: the single-minded solve intractable problems, build monuments in days, and achieve universal plenitude. By every criterion the minimalist theory foregrounds (representation, behavioral repertoire, goal-directed action), the pupilless inhabitants of the post-conscious world are superb agents. Lafferty has one of his characters spell the comparison out: “If computers perform mental marvels without being conscious, why can not people do the same? But I myself have second thoughts about these things (‘Second thoughts are infidelities that are as superfluous as they are illegal’ is one of the new Analects of today), I myself have second thoughts about the Great Ones. I feel that there is something very tinny about the tone of each of those great ones just when he comes to his most majestic stage.” But the story's argument is that the theory (because it cannot distinguish between this outcome and a genuine flourishing) is missing something it has no vocabulary for. The single-minded satisfy the criteria of agency, and the world they make is a spiritual catastrophe. It is another gnostically closed cosmos filled with blank-eyed sleepwalkers. This is, of course, another eschatological nightmare. As such, I think it is being contrasted with what Lafferty takes to be authentic eschatological fulfillment in the communion of the saints. This part of the story is not particularly subtle, but if one doesn’t know the idea, it could look as if Lafferty’s satiric norm were just negative liberty, or possessive individualism, or the sovereign self, or whatever other liberal stand-in we want to propose to neuter the theological edge. The "single-mindedness" and "one-horn" parodies the communion of saints and the life of the Church by making spiritual unity a forced, unconscious collectivism. Lafferty makes this obvious by using ecclesiastical language. He refers to the "single-minded gospel," the "holy hymn" of the One-Horned Cow, and the "ascension" (counterfiguration, again) of those who lose their individual consciousness to join the "Great Everything." The hymn performed by the computers emphasizes the lack of interiority in this new unity: The true minds soar intense and narrow And single-minded as an arrow. They're mighty in their leap. They're even mighty in their sleep. The one-horned cows rest on their haunches And are not really very conscious.’ This mimics the theological concept of the Body of Christ. In both the One-Horned Cow and the Communion of the Saints, believers are urged to be of one mind and heart; however, in the One-Horned Cow parody, unity is achieved through the death of the person rather than through their sanctification—which is to say, through the person's full spiritual actualization. Lafferty has a brilliant moment where he shows this by having Singletree forget Jonquil’s name and address her as "person." The One-Horned Cow has the word person, but it doesn’t know what the word means. For me, the English writer who gets this right is William Blake. His Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion  is about how one can belong to a spiritual collective without losing particularity. A little background helps if one has not read it. Jerusalem  was Blake’s last and longest prophetic poem (written and engraved c. 1804–1820). It is a difficult masterpiece, an illuminated epic. The fallen giant Albion, symbolic of England and of humanity, must awaken to spiritual unity in what Blake calls the “Human Form Divine.” Blake wrote the poem amid the upheavals of the Industrial Revolution and the aftermath of the French Revolution. He believed imagination, individuality, and spiritual vision were being crushed by materialism, institutional religion, the sleep of Newton, and what he famously called the “dark Satanic Mills.” Jerusalem  is part of Blake’s campaign, conducted through poetry and art, to show that humanity is “One Man” in Christ, yet redeemed only through love of the living uniqueness of each person A few examples of what this looks like to show how the One Man differs from the One-Horned Cow. Jerusalem, Plate 34, contains the following lines: . . . we live as One Man; for contracting our infinite senses We behold multitude; or expanding: we behold as one, As One Man all the Universal Family; and that One Man We call Jesus the Christ: and he in us, and we in him Live in perfect harmony, in Eden the land of life.” What makes Blake's One Man different from the One-Horned Cow is the emphasis on minute particulars. In Plate 55, Blake writes, He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars; General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite & flatterer: For Art & Science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars. And just above: Labour well the Minute Particulars: attend to the Little Ones; And those who are in misery cannot remain so long, If we do but our duty to them. These minute particulars are what the One-Horned Cow cannot abide and abolishes when it wipes away the pupils and irises of those who are brought within its regime of post-consciousness: "In Greek statuary, the people always had pupils in their eyes, but the gods did not. The gods were always blank-eyed," Jonquil said. "There was a reason for that, person," Singletree said. . . "The pupils of an eye particularize and focus. But to focus on any one thing is to insult the Great Everything. Let us all have blank eyes, unfocused and open to everything. I tell you that there is jubilation in the wide halls of the unconscious over this new unchaining from the fetters of consciousness." Finally, one of the strangest and most interesting aspects of the story is the change rung on Lafferty’s zoon anthropikon in what happens with the dogs. As I read the story, people exit from the sacramental economy and join the One-Horned Cow and it affects nature. Singletree says, "Do you know that dogs, to some extent, have shared the sickness of consciousness with people? But they'll soon be cured of that." As is often the case, the extension of the term consciousness in the story goes beyond what we usually refer to as consciousness. To see this, consider that when Jonquil is eaten, she has to be eaten in every minute particular for her sparky consciousness to be destroyed. Just as the body is the form of the soul in hylomorphism, Jonquil’s body has to be negated out of existence entirely to destroy her spark: The feral dogs came to tear her apart and eat her body then. But she was stubbornly conscious right to the very end of it. Aye, in every torn-apart piece she was conscious until the pieces were completely eaten. The domestication of the dogs, in the story's logic, was a form of participatory consciousness, a sacramental participation of the kind one finds in stories such as “Animal Fair.”with it comes moral responsibility. We are told dogs became what they are through millennia of cohabitation with conscious beings, sharing in the human order the way participants share in a liturgical reality. When that order is rejected, when its human members exit the sacramental economy and join the One-Horned Cow, the participation is withdrawn and the dogs revert. Again, this is esoteric and Gnostic Lafferty, full of wonderful, weird stuff. It is worth wrestling with in this new Machine Age as the One-Horned Cow of singularity demands its hymnody.

My stories are slightly future history, set just far enough into the future as not to get stepped on by the present. Yes, I hope the bits and pieces will fall into it. I am always out in the rain with a bucket and trying to catch something. Yes, sometimes I use the old trick of having stories connected by a common minor character or otherwise. Balzac was one of the inventors of this device a hundred and forty or so years ago. In his Human Comedy, he ran quite a few of his characters in and out of the hundred novels and novellas that made it up. Quite a few other writers have used the device since, and before (there is nothing wrong with imitating a thing in advance). Several sets of my people will know each other, even if they may not be on quite the same fictional or reality level. — Cranky Old Man from Tulsa: Interviews with R. A. Lafferty  (Weston, ON: United Mythologies Press, 1990) This was about forty years ago, no more than ten or twelve years after I began to follow the county fairs, and I was not yet motorized. I made about thirty fairs a year, giving no more than half a week to any except the biggest of them. I covered these with horse and wagon through late summer, fall, and early winter. In the later dead of winter I lived in the far southland as a gentleman should; and when spring touched the northland again I was with the first of the carnivals. Before he was Willy McGilly, a name to put a twinkle in the eye of any Lafferty fan, he was Willy McGilley. Lafferty’s “Thousand Dollar Melon” is told in Willy’s voice. It is a whopper about him growing huge watermelons to win the hand of a country girl. There are many good reasons to avoid the view that the tall tale is the royal road to understanding Lafferty’s work, yet here is an exception to my bitchy rule. This one is a tall tale from stem to stern. Moreover, it belongs to a familiar American subgenre: the early twentieth-century county fair story. That now extinct tradition goes back at least to Charles Egbert Craddock’s “Taking the Blue Ribbon at the County Fair” (1895). It then becomes American literature in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919). It receives an untold number of variations in word and on screen, true Americana. Finally, it achieves American myth in E. B. White’s children’s classic Charlotte’s Web . When Lafferty crosses it with the folksy hyperbole of Mark Twain’s 1865 “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” the result was this, a prenucleation Lafferty story if there ever was one. This Willy is a traveling showman and con man. He visits the Clay County Fair and falls in love with an attractive butterball, Clarissa Clay. They meet cute with her buying three seats for herself at his kooch show. You can now understand with what joy I welcomed Miss Clarissa Clay. She was gorgeous. She would have made three of any of them. She was a sunny blonde with a smile as big as all summertime. She smelled like a field of sweet clover; and in area and scope the resemblance also was striking. Along the way, we learn about Willy’s carnival circuit, with him mentioning a few cities. One, Berryville, is in Arkansas; others, Seligman, Golden, and Blue Eyes, are in Missouri. It seems as if Clarissa Clay is from Arkansas or Missouri, but her Ozark location stays one of the story's secrets. As Willy says, “As to what region or state it was in, that is a secret I will carry till I lay down all my secrets. There is still some gold of my sort to be mined in those hills.” Regardless, Clarissa is the granddaughter of the county's founder, real Ozark gentry, but she is also tied to a perpetual endowment that awards $1,000 annually to the grower of the largest edible watermelon. Because the family farm is entailed to support this prize, she is in a bind. The way out is to marry the perennial winner, the watermelon king Walter Wildpepper. It will keep the money in the Clay family. The smitten Willy asks Clarissa to wait one year. He will grow a melon large enough to win the contest and her hand in marriage. To do this, Willy has a plan. He secures seeds for a wild giant African watermelon that grows significantly larger than standard varieties. He plants the seeds in Clay County, and Clarissa tends to them while Willy goes back on the carnival circuit with his troop of Turkish harem girls. By the time of the fair the following year, the melons are huge—over four hundred pounds. Unfortunately, they are nearly inedible and wood-like in texture, and the contest has a sticky requirement: the melons must be edible. Willy has a another plan. He uses a veterinarian's needle to inject the melons with a mixture of beef tenderizer, acid, scarlet dye, and sugar. I reasoned that Dr. McGilley's Beef Tenderizer could not but be useful. And I had a little-known acid with the peculiar properties of attacking wood pulp, which was what the insides of the giant melons tasted like. Then I shot in a quantity of scarlet dye, and about thirty pounds of saturated solution of sugar into each of them. The night before the judging, four of the melons explode. Willy thinks that Walter has sabotaged him, but it is of course his own watermelon injections that are the cause. Willy being Willy, has a backup plan, a secret backup melon, the largest melon of all. To make it edible, he treats it with a triple dose of his chemical concoction. On the day of the judging, the final giant melon explodes during the watermelon judging ceremony. It nearly takes out the fairgrounds and injures several attendees. We are told the deaths themselves were exaggerations. Willy realizes that his "Beef Tenderizer" pharmaceutical was the cause of the explosion; he never knew why people who bought his nostrums exploded. I had had patients and customers explode for many years, but had never found the cause of it, as I usually sell a mark my whole line of pharmaceuticals and not one item only. I had suspected the Old Homestead Stomach Sweetener. I had suspected the Kill Number Nine. I had even suspected the New World Bone Builder and Thorax Encourager... But I had never suspected the Beef Tenderizer. As a result of the disaster, Willy’s watermelon is disqualified. Clarissa marries Walter Wildpepper. Willy leaves the county in a damaged wagon, tended to by one of his carnival performers, Frito (Hermione Huckle), whom he eventually marries as he continues his career as a con man. The story ends with him about to tell another tall tale. "Thousand Dollar Melon" is a simple story in which what you see is what you get, made enjoyable by Lafferty’s verbal wit, but it a story mainly for the completist. Lafferty leans into rural humor as well as the lumber of the formerly funny: fake Turkish harem girls, medical quackery, watermelons, fat women (Willy wants Clarissa to travel with the carnival as the fat lady). The subplot of harem girl Hermione Huckle (“Frito”) trying to win over the oblivious Willy is a nice touch. Yet there is something odd about the idea of a married Willy McGilly. And there is something odd about any Willy McGilly narrating his own story, even this roustabout descendant of the Yankee peddler archetype. The absence of a more determinate watermelon Willy, equipped with a background and a marriage, from the published canon is probably salutary. It keeps open the shifty, unpindownable Willy we know. That one is, in his way, as much a Lafferty signature as Finnegan. To lock the quicksilver Willy McGilly into the “Thousand Dollar Melon” shape would impoverish that more memorable rogue. I'm glad this Willy exists in what Lafferty called its own fictional or reality level.

I’ve been thinking about the dynamics of Gnosticism/eschatology and R. A. Lafferty lately, so here’s a quick sketch, more a prompt than a full argument, with a way in. Philip K. Dick and Lafferty share an obsession: the twentieth-century recovery of Gnosticism as the problem of modernity. Hans Jonas is the obvious touchstone; both writers almost certainly knew his work. What interests me is where they split once you ask what “Gnosticism” means under modern conditions. How much either of them knew the German debates that later shaped questions of Gnosticism, eschatology, and time is hard to say, though both were serious autodidacts who worked with ideas that fascinated Löwith, Benjamin, Blumenberg, Strauss, Voegelin, Taubes, and so forth. The divide, as I see it, is this: Dick makes Gnosticism post-Cartesian; Lafferty keeps it pre-Cartesian. Dick’s versions of the problem are trapped inside the cogito , a self sealed in its own consciousness, not sure there’s a criterion that connects private experience to public reality. Lafferty, by contrast, writes as if the cogito isn’t the center of the universe. Because his imagination is sacramental, the question moves from the hermetic self to the status of the shared world: not “am I  trapped?” but “are we  trapped together in a common, false cosmos?” Dick worries about the prison of the self; Lafferty worries about the prison of consensus reality. One is post-Cartesian; the other, pre-Cartesian. Each writer verges across the epistemic-ontological binary, but it's a thought about how to start contrasting them and to think about centers of narrative gravity.