Lafferty is pretty divisive among readers, probably more so today than half a century ago: either you’re a fan of his stuff or you ain’t. I’m not a fan myself, really, but I’ll try anything once (or even twice). In the case of Lafferty it’s mainly because he’s Quirky™ that he has a love-him-or-hate-him reputation, although this same quirkiness also threw him into the midst of the New Wave, despite being politically and socially conservative and also already middle-aged, being about a generation older than most of his fellow New Wavers. — Online Person “Oh, yes. All have names. Might as well take them all.” “Only people, Manuel.” For a little over half of “Sodom and Gomorrah, Texas,” the main character is Manuel, a poor and unqualified Mexican census taker, who is assigned to calculate the population of the Santa Magdalena sector. It is a harsh, torrid region in Texas that has a glassified crater known as Sodom. Told to count everyone but very pointedly told not to record animals, Manuel asks if he should include "little people." He gets approval from a supervisor unconcerned with the reality of the terrain: “How about little people?” “Children, yes, that has been explained to you.” “Little people. Not children. Little people.” “If they are people, take them.” “How big they have to be?” “It doesn't make any difference how big they are. If they are people, take them.” And off Manuel goes to record the area's nine regular human residents—plus himself. Had he considered his job finished right then, the narrator notes that he would have saved 10,000 lives. Instead, he makes a fateful decision: "Might as well take them all." Loading Mula with stacks of extra census forms, he climbs the purgatorial scarp above Lost Soul Creek, and then he takes a spade to the roof of a buried settlement called Nuevo Danae to count its tiny inhabitants. The story then jumps. Manuel returns to the High Plains, where he received his commission, aged, shrunken, and near death, claiming to have been trapped on a treadmill by the tiny inhabitants for thirty-five years: Three days later an incredible dwarf staggered into the outskirts of High Plains, Texas. He was followed by a dying wolf-sized animal that did not look like a wolf.A lady called the police to save the pair from rock-throwing kids who would have killed them; and the two as yet unclassified things were taken to the station house. Mula dies upon arrival at the police station. Manuel, though, gives a microscopic list containing a million names to Mr. Marshal, the current census chief, who can’t believe his luck. Marshal has been facing pressure from a citizens' group to meet a 10,000-person population quota. He ignores the circumstances of Manuel's disappearance and physical state. The town officials certify the list of names and submit it to Washington. They annex Nuevo Danae and inflate the population of the High Plains. Manuel drops dead. Later that night, Marshal gets a visitor in his bedroom. It is a four-inch-tall man who demands the return of the stolen list. The tiny intruder paralyzes Marshal and says his people hold the deed to Earth. They destroyed the local area called Sodom with a microscopic weapon because the human settlement was too close to theirs. But it is too late. The census list has already been mailed to Washington, prompting the tiny official to pass swift judgment on the town: “A thing that size couldn't crack a walnut,” said Marshal. “You floundering fop, it will blast this town flat.” “And if it does, what will happen to you?” “Nothing. I don't even blink for things like that. I haven't time to explain it to you, you gaping goof. I have to get to Washington.” The small man calls High Plains a nuisance and detonates another tiny explosive. The blast annihilates High Plains and reduces its population to zero, an event the public attributes to a giant meteor. Now there are two glassified areas that are later proposed as the site for a new Sodom and Gomorrah state park. If you look at what people have written about “Sodom and Gomorrah, Texas,” you find sharply diverging views. Some like it as a light tall tale. Others think it reads like a draft, or like magazine filler, and remains undercooked. The story was finished in July 1970 and sent to A. L. Fierst, and sold quickly. Because it sometimes takes a beating on blogs for being too short, and for the fault line some readers see where Manual dies, it is worth pausing over its virtues, especially if one remembers that this is early Lafferty. Most readers will catch at least four registers: bureaucratic comedy, mythic landscape, tall tale, and horror, all without a visible seam. What one finds is tonal control. Its ideal reader probably laughs at the setup, accepts the fable logic of the middle, admires the brilliant regional writing, and arrives at the annihilation of the High Plains. It is a joke, a parable, and a political act in under four thousand words. Someone has poked at the story for being politically insensitive about the word midget. He does not seem to realize that "midget" became a slur in the late 20th century, or that the Little People of America was founded in 1957 as the Midgets of America. Today I want to push back a little against the political nonsense and show where the story’s real politics lie. “Sodom and Gomorrah, Texas” is mostly told from the perspective of the people who caused its disaster, unaware they were doing so. The voices that control its world (or think they do; they are mistaken) are the census bureaucrats, the police, the citizens' committee, and Mr. Marshal. They are the voices of official English-speaking Texas. Manuel speaks, but when we see it, it is to them, in their space, to answer their questions. When he rides back into High Plains shrunken and in shambles, the officials' initial skepticism gives way to immediate, callous opportunism: “You can't be Manuel,” said Marshal. “He can't be Manuel,” said the big policemen and the little policemen. “Maybe not then. I thought I was. Who am I then? Let's look at the other papers to see which one I am.” “No, you can't be any of them either, Manuel. And you surely can't be Manuel.” “Give him a name anyhow and get him counted,” said the head of the citizens group. “We got to get to that ten thousand mark.” They don’t give a damn about Manual. They take his microfilm-like list of the little people. Then, Manual dies, and they try to find the place on a map. Lafferty wrote the story after the April 1, 1960, census, and there is a relevant scriptural sidelight that matters for understanding what the story is doing. In 1 Chronicles 21, Satan, or God, depending on how one reads the passage, provokes David to number Israel. David wants to know how many fighting men there are. This has been interpreted in several ways, but two readings seem to matter most. The first is that David did not trust God to lead him to victory in battle and instead wanted to make the matter one of numbers. The second is that Israel belongs to God, and to count what belongs to God is, in some sense, to claim it. One of the rules governing a census in the Old Testament appears in Exodus 30, which prescribes a half-shekel ransom for every person counted, so that “there be no plague among them when you number them.” It is something like an apology or a propitiatory gesture. David does not collect the ransom. God gives him three choices of punishment. David chooses the plague. God sends it. Seventy thousand die. Seven thousand die at the end in High Plains, Texas. In response to the complaint that the story becomes claustrophobic and narrows at the end, I would argue that this is the shape of trespass the story diagnoses. The reader is encouraged at the beginning to laugh at Manual, who does not see the difference between counting people and counting things like rabbits. But Lafferty is laughing at the dumb reader who does not see the instrumental perversity of quantifying persons in the first place. Then there is the way Manual is an instrumentalized object used to instrumentalize others. He’s a Mexican man employed by a system that considers him barely competent but cheap enough to use. "He was poor and needed the work." He cannot read a map because maps are not how he knows the land. He knows it phenomenologically, not as something abstracted onto a sheet of paper with North at the top. He knows all nine people in 900 square miles well enough to fill out their census forms from memory because he sees them as people, not just as statistics. He says the animals have names, and there is a joke here when he calls his mule Mula because the name “mule” is an Adamic name, that is, one picks out an essence that differs from what makes persons persons, Lafferty’s theme that persons can be realized in different species, just two persons of the Trinity have nothing human about them. Manual knows that he is doing something shady, just as David does. We know this because he prays the Hail Mary in Spanish as he climbs toward the little people's town—pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death: He called Mula from the thorn patch where she was grazing and gave her salt and loaded her again. Then they went to take the rest of the census — but in fear. There was a clear duty to get the job done, but there was also a dread of it that the superiors did not understand. There was reason also why Mula was loaded with packs of census forms till she could hardly walk.Manuel prayed out loud as they climbed the purgatorial scarp above Lost Soul Creek "— ruega por nosotros pecodores ahora "— the very gulches stood angry and stark in the hot early morning— " y en la hora de nuestra muerte ." The people in High Plains, Texas, are not like this at all. In fact, the citizens' committee does not care about census accuracy, Manuel, or the little people. They want to reach ten thousand for federal funding. "We declare that the place annexed forthwith. This will make High Plains the biggest town in Texas." That is annexing a sovereign community by bureaucratic fiat, for a population statistic, and it puts the story in conversation with other works by Lafferty that deal with the issue, such as Okla Hannali . Not that the little people are much better. Their head is angry because Manual stole the tax rolls. Manual doesn’t know that the list is a tax roll because, in part, he does not experience the world this way. He does not see that he is in the middle of a bureaucratic fight. The little people's representative reveals to Marshal a delusion of ownership rooted in a cosmic scam: “Not belong on the world? We own the world. We can show written title to the world. Can you?” “I doubt it. Where did you get the title?” “We got it from a promoter of sorts, a con man really. I have to admit that we were taken, but we were in a spot and needed a world. He said that the larger bifurcates were too stupid to be a nuisance.” They are delusional in their own way, but they do know that they are perpetrating a con in the claim. That is a counterpoint to the con that the people of the High Plains, Texas, want to run the government. Now, the story does not make these politics the whole point—Lafferty never does that—but consider some really specific context. At the time, the Bracero Program was running. Mexican and Mexican-American laborers across South and West Texas lived under a system that used them for labor and excluded them from power. The 1960 census was the first to ask a direct question about Hispanic origin. The census was a tool of administrative control applied to people who had been on the land before the tool existed. Their survival and silence form the final, strategic act of defiance against the bureaucratic state: When the final count was in, High Plains did not have the highest percentage gain in the Nation. Actually it showed the sharpest decline of any town — from 7313 to nothing. It is believed that High Plains was destroyed by a giant meteor. But there are eight, nine people in the Santa Magdalena who know what really happened, and they won't tell. That ending where the nine residents are spared is the real ending of the story. But I'd wager most people don’t see that the second ending is a red herring. They settle for the voice of a brochure and the irony of its tourism pitch: They were going to make a forest preserve out of the place, except that it has no trees worthy of the name. Now it is proposed to make it the Sodom and Gomorrah State Park from the two mysterious scenes of desolation there just seven miles apart.It is an interesting place, as wild a region as you will ever find, and is recommended for the man who has seen everything. The person quoted at the beginning of this post is like that. He fixates on the sadism of “Sodom and Gomorrah, Texas,” declines to repeat the dreaded slur “midget,” and at one point writes, “‘Sodom and Gomorrah, Texas’ is not as good as ‘The Transcendent Tigers,’ for one because it’s not as funny, but also I feel like Lafferty has less of a point to make.” I cannot quarrel with his feelings, but the story has a much stronger point to make than "The Transcendent Tigers."

Colonel Zornig instituted flogging to show the Pani thathe was serious about them keeping their places. He didn'tknow if it did any good. The Pani grinned when they werewhipped, and they grinned about it. “Have you people no sense of pain?” he questioned. “Man colonel, we sure don't like the stuff,” Ieska said. “But you grin when you're whipped.” “The happy grin is a convention of your own sort, Ibelieve. With us the grin doesn't mean the same thing.” “What does it mean then?” Zornig demanded. “It mean, ‘there will come a day, men tnings, there will come a day.” “The Pani Planet” is both ahead of its time and slightly ambiguous. Daniel Otto Jack Petersen has pointed out that Pani  is the French form of Pawnee . He and others have also noted the story’s colonial and anti-colonial elements. Those are astute observations because the story is fundamentally about military occupation and who gets to tell it. The story takes place in the wake of the death of the human expedition's commander, General Raddle. The officious Colonel Zornig assumes control of the Pani Planet. Zornig is one of Lafferty’s unlikeable martinets. He rejects a request from Ieska, an alien Pani interpreter, to take the general's corpse and "fix" it, a conversation that highlights the profound disconnect between the two cultures: “Our companion and commander is dead,” said Colonel Zornig. “Do you understand the word?”“Sure. It is broke like I said. Haven't you parts to fix it?”“There are no parts that would avail. One dies completely.”“Bad design. Give it to me. Maybe I can fix it.” Despite Ieska's protests, General Raddle will get a traditional guarded burial. Viewing the puzzling indigenous population as a treacherous threat (the previous group of humans on Pani Planet were all found dead, and Zornig suspects poisoning), Zornig institutes severe punitive measures—including floggings, weapon confiscations, and the destruction of Pani homes—to keep colonial order. That all goes to hell when the humans discover that Raddle's grave seems to have been opened. His body is missing. Shortly after the disappearance of the body, General Raddle reappears at the human garrison, looking pretty rough. He says that he had actually been in a cataleptic trance and that the Pani had rescued him from being buried alive. That is what Ieska meant by fix. And they did fix them by curing him with their traditional remedies. Re-asserting his command, Raddle reverses Zornig's security policies. He places the expedition's doctor under arrest, the only character who seems sane in the story. Mobley later provides the story's most incisive critique of the colonial mindset when questioned by Zornig: “Could a simple people like the Pani somehow have the knowledge to bring a dead man back to life?” “That is what I lost my mind over. But even as a crazy man let me correct you in one error. Primitive peoples are never simple. They are frighteningly complex. It is we who are simple, because civilization is nothing but a simplification.” Following the doctor's arrest, Raddle next grants Ieska unrestricted freedom, and he dismisses the regular military guards in favor of an unseen special guard. Early on, we are told that Raddle is a master strategist, but this obviously leaves the garrison vulnerable. Paranoia abounds among the human soldiers, leading Zornig to suspect an impending, coordinated Pani ambush. Acting on his strategic instincts and a warning from a subordinate, Zornig takes action, the way any red-blooded colonial hero would in a story set behind, say, Zulu lines. He captures and physically tortures Ieska to get the truth. Under the threat of a steel pike, Ieska upends the illusion of control: “Kill me then, but this is truth: we didn't do anything to him. What could we do? We couldn't any more fix him than anything. After a while he got pretty what you call foul smell and we got rid of him.” “Then who has been commanding us?” “Like in one of your joke books, man Colonel—‘Who, me driving? I thought you were driving!’ Nobody has been commanding you, man Colonel. We like it that way.” The tortured Ieska confesses that the real General Raddle died and was discarded by the Pani. The figure issuing orders is neither Raddle nor a zombie version of him, but a Pani impostor. Zornig then executes a preemptive counter-coup. He neutralizes multiple pockets of Pani infiltrators just before their grand trap can be sprung, and the whole episode plays like a replay of the last days of General Gordon. How did Zornig work it out? Ieska let slip that the Pani could mimic anything, and the colonel ordered the captured aliens to be kept alive as exhibition specimens. Readers who missed the earlier line about mimicry are thus given a detective story that plays fair. It took a long time for “Pani Planet” to be republished or collected. That did not happen until 2025, when it appeared in Volume 8 of the Centipede Press edition of Lafferty’s short stories, The Man Who Lost His Magic . The story is far better than it has generally been taken to be, though it does not, in my view, rise to the level of the best SF-styled work he was doing at the time. In that 1963 cluster, one finds “All But the Words,” “Crocodile,” “Vestige,” “Mad Man,” and “Last Laugh.” I would place “Pani Planet” fourth from the bottom, ahead of “All But the Words,” “Last Laugh,” and “Vestige,” though “Last Laugh” is later rehabilitated when its ideas are developed in Past Master . “All But the Words,” by contrast, seems to me an exceedingly minor Lafferty story. Unlike the major “Ride a Tin Can,” which also uses the device of storytelling aliens, “Pani Planet” does not work terribly hard to secure the reader’s sympathy for the aliens themselves. Instead, Lafferty tells the story from the other side, from the side of the colonizers. One is meant to see how nasty they are from within, as it were. It would be like learning about the Sheni through a story told by the people running the tinning operation. The question “Pani Planet” asks is one we all know well now, though in the early 1960s, it was fresher: who gets to tell the story? Here are the main candidates. Zornig imposes a military narrative. False Raddle imposes a narrative of trust. Doctor Mobley imposes a paranoid narrative. Ieska works all three while claiming that he is too stupid for anything but storytelling. By the end of “Pani Planet,” whoever controls the narrative wins, and Ieska very nearly does, because he controls more narratives at once, while the humans do not realize they are characters in a colonial uprising plot until it is almost too late. There is an irony here. The otherwise loathsome Zornig defeats Ieska by doing what colonizers are often condemned for failing to do: he actually listens. Because he listens, he catches a single word dropped early, “mime,” listed as one of the Pani trades. Ieska had claimed to be bad at it, and that slip ruins the Pani counter-operation against the human colonizers. Once confronted with this, Ieska admits defeat: “Ah, there I have dropped the molasses jug, there I have cracked the cooky jar, there was where the excretion hit the air-vanes—your say words all. That we are mimes who can mimic anything—I let that cat out of the carpet bag. In this I was near as stupid as yourself.” The false Raddle calls it Ieska's "mouth disease." In addition to the listening ambiguity, there is an ending, which keeps us a world away from the pathos of “Ride a Tin Can”: Ieska, facing death or the zoo, asks for a copy of Billboard: “I'd kill you with perfect delight, but we have our instructions as to the handling of interesting specimens. You will be on exhibition. You always have been.” “I must find about bookings. Where is multi-list planetary edition of Billboard man soldier have lying around?” As I said, it is ambiguous. Lafferty finished "The Pani Planet" in July 1963, a few months after completing Okla Hannali . Both involve a colonial power arriving in a promising land and subjugating the resident people. Okla Hannali  treats this with seriousness; "The Pani Planet" lets the colonizers win as a plot twist. And there is the further issue of reception. The story appeared in 1965, just as American awareness of Vietnam was growing, and the coincidence was on my mind rereading the story this time: the flogging, the kill-perimeters, the destruction of food and dwellings. Americans would learn of My Lai only in November 1969. A few years after its publication, the story would have read differently. I question whether Lafferty would even have written it then, given how closely anti-colonialism had become tied to other aspects of youth culture, and given his belief that Vietnam was in the national interest because of his fierce hatred of all things communist. It is telling that the bad guys in "Ride a Tin Can" are not military, but commercial. In any case, one can see in “The Pani Planet” themes that receive better but less ambiguous treatment elsewhere.

“I am alone now, truly alone, and absolutely isolated from any known life. I am it. If a count were taken, the score would be three billion plus two on the other side of the moon, and one plus God knows what on this side.” — Michael Collins, Carrying the Fire (1974) "Other Side of the Moon” is early Lafferty. It centers on Johnny O’Conner, who lives by routine. Every evening, he takes the same bus with the same passengers. They include the old Joker with the egg-shaped face, the noble-nosed Nabob, and the little man who looked like an onion. Each one gets off at the same stop, every time. One night, a fellow rider, a plain blonde girl, breaks the pattern. When it’s her stop, she says, “Not tonight.” That shakes Johnny, so he rides one stop farther than usual. After stopping by a different bar, he walks home. But things have changed. It’s like seeing his house for the first time, like seeing “the other side of the moon.” For instance, notice the cracked paint and the torn screen. The next night, now in a reckless mood, he follows the girl again and ends up in the same strange place: the Krazy Kat Club Number Two. There, he overhears a barmaid telling a story about a woman who uses her husband’s fixed routine to cover up a secret life. The man, she says, is “so deep in a rut he can’t see over the top.” Then she says the woman’s name: Sheila O'Connor, Johnny’s wife. Johnny trembles. He spills his chaser. The life he thought was safe and ordinary is upended. He has left the rut. This is one of the first Lafferty stories I read. I’m not sure why. I think I downloaded The Man Who Talled Tales , scrolled through it on my iPad, and picked this one because it was short. As one of his early stories, it follows a more conventional structure than his later work. But two things stand out to me now. First, it takes on a writerly problem Lafferty kept returning to: how to handle too many characters. Rather than avoiding the issue, the story builds a structure capable of accommodating more characters than most writers would ever attempt in six pages. Second, it has Lafferty themes that would grow more radical and experimental over time. The protagonist, Johnny O’Connor, discovers he is living two lives—one he’s aware of, and one he isn’t. This makes him one of Lafferty’s early versions of a “schizo-gash”—the split or doubling of identity—which Lafferty, of course, develops in characters like Finnegan, who lives an upper and a lower life, and in countless others. In this story, the gash shows up in the physical world, exteriorized, in the never-noticed-before cracked paint and torn screen of Johnny’s house. If Finnegan is an inverted schizo-gash, Johnny is an early, everted one. The reader sees Johnny being cleaved, as if becoming an early form of the Lafferty ghost—another variation on Lafferty’s statement that “the only thing that I have learned about all people, that they are ghostly and that they are sometimes split-off.” What for Johnny amounts to alienation from objective conditions becomes ontologized in Finnegan and in other characters in Lafferty, as in the great passage in The Devil Is Dead , in which Finnegan sees it as clearly as he ever will: “He remembered almost everything now, his upper life with its certain occupations and sets of friends, his lower life with other sets. He remembered the strange division in himself that was not new. But he did not remember anything about the last several months, and he sure did not remember what had happened last night. He went to his room to sleep.” But Lafferty hasn’t arrived at the Ghost Story yet. I love how clearly this early short story uses alcohol as a map of Johnny’s psychological escape from routine. It’s smart. I’ve never had a Vodka Collins, but it sounds like the perfect drink for someone stuck in a rut: safe, predictable, a mid-century standard that takes no thought, just a life running on autopilot. The first time Johnny breaks that pattern, he orders a Cuba Libre, a drink that both Finnegan and, apparently, Lafferty himself liked. The name, “Free Cuba,” feels like a small, quiet toast to independence, a cautious act of rebellion. It is just exotic enough to free Johnny a bit, but still common enough not to push him too far. It captures his first, uncertain step into a larger world. On the next night, Johnny not only breaks his word to his wife, but he also orders a Sazerac. That’s a real departure. A sazerac is no bland highball but a complex, historic cocktail with mystique. He orders it just “to see what it was like.” Whenever I go to New Orleans, I always make sure to get one, and a gin fizz, but neither is a drink I’d order in my hometown. Too exotic, with its mixture of sugar, Peychaud’s bitters, rye whiskey, rinse of absinthe, all finished with a twist of lemon, all coming together in a bracing, licorice-tinged flavor. By choosing the Sazerac, Johnny reaches into the dangerously unknown. The drink is bitter, complex, and tied to a storied past, a New Orleans past full of booze and sex. Afterward, splashing vodka into tonic water isn't the same.

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, which 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 nihilo , it would necessarily include built-in signs of history, Gosse reasoned. 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 point of creation. 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 consider the possibility that the universe was not created 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 of 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. 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 occur at every person’s death, and it relates to his view that everyone is already dead and his rejection of non-eschatological finality. 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 which were 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 like it parallels 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, which is complete only 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 molded (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 its pendant texts. As I have said before, the main character in the Ghost Story is the person's relation to time.

Because of the trashiness of its origins, there has grown a sort of amnesia over the account of how we became as amazingly smart as we are now, and of how we were even smarter for a while there. This honest account should cut through the amnesia a little bit. "I Don't Care Who Keeps the Cows" There is laughter, and there isn’t supposed to be. "Sex and Sorcery" “I Don’t Care Who Keeps the Cows” rarely draws notice, but it deserves to be read. Not only for its searing grotesquerie, but for its laughter. Lafferty readers will recognize that laughter from “Nine Hundred Grandmothers” (1966), and they can hear it again in one of his strangest experiments, the unpublished, wise, and mortifying “Sex and Sorcery” (1973). In that story, a pornographer traveling with a team into the future keeps hearing the same chuckling. Lafferty uses it to shape his version of the theology of the body. It is the laughter that erupts when moral idiocy and a failure of imagination go too far. "Cows" does this by posing a question: What would happen if humanity did an end run around the Law of Intellectual Constancy? Science fiction, of course, loves that kind of question, but so does Western storytelling more broadly, from Prometheus and Icarus to the Sorcerer’s Apprentice and Dr. Jekyll. For historical exemplars, there is Simon Magus in antiquity, Roger Bacon in the Middle Ages, Faust in the Renaissance, and Victor Frankenstein in the Romantic era. In our own time, the examples are too numerous to count. Lafferty adds his voice to that long tradition. In the story, human intelligence seems to take a huge leap when people begin using special steroids and other gimmicks. Three main "smart" groups form: the Scar-Tissue Clan, who grow extra brain tissue; the Necklace Clan, who wear their brain extensions as jewelry that links them to information centers; and the Little Red Wagon People, who pull their added brain mass behind them in wagons. A small group called the Quacksalvers (led by Jerome Blackfoot and Ferndale Whitehead) stays "normal" by choice, selling these brain upgrades without using them. As the world grows "smarter," new kinds of conflict emerge, eventually ending in a showdown between the brain-boosted masses and the unimproved few. But just as intellect peaks, the brainy modified humans realize they have become the intellectual equivalent of cows being milked. Someone laughs—and the spell breaks. This is the third post on the Law of Intellectual Constancy in Lafferty, so I’ll keep the focus narrow. A few points stand out. First, there is a forgetting of the old budget—a kind of amnesia, as the narrator calls it. This reflects Lafferty’s idea that the law of intellectual constancy in modernity often comes with a kind of loss of memory, which I discussed in the previous two posts. The story uses this forgetting to riff on what happens when the intellectual budget is overspent. Intelligence, once a shared human potential, becomes instrumentalized, a commodity to buy, to own, to rank, or, in the allegory of the story, livestock rather than a person. But the attempt to cheat the Law causes it to snap back, hard. Government hierarchies reassert scarcity. The Quacksalvers outmaneuver everyone. And in the end, the new economy of intellect collapses into laughter. There are many ways to interpret all this. The one that makes the most sense to me is a double elastic snap. What looks like a break in the law ends up rebalancing itself. The ordinary cunning of the Quacksalvers shows that when the law is disturbed, occult compensation must overspill. This is the first snap: the Quacksalvers extract intellectual milk from the Scar-Tissue Clan, the Necklace Clan, and the Little Red Wagon People. At this point, they have rigged the system of occult compensation in their favor. The second snap comes when their scheme collapses in the face of human laughter, fully restoring the law and confirming its nomological necessity. But another of the super-brains laughed. There was a chasm, and there shouldn't have been. There was maladjustment, and a ridiculous bridge was the best that could be thrown over it. They broke it, and they lost part of it when they broke it. The whole apparatus of being so smart crumbled, even though a lot of the smartness would remain. The top of the mountain of it was gone. We'll never be that smart again.

“What is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.” — Francis Bacon, “Of Truth,”  Essays, 3rd ed. (1625) “But is your information and discoveries correct?” Judy asked. “What is correct?” Austro asked, looking like an owl. “What do you think of the ethics of wearing such a face, Austro?” “What is right?” asked Austro, looking like an owl. “What is not-quite-right? What, on the face of it, is a face?” “What's behind this funny false face caper anyhow?” “What is ‘funny’?” asked Austro in his owlish way. “What is ‘false’?” “Are you sure it is the same man?” Otis Hardtack asked. “What is ‘sure’?” Austro asked. “Who is this Cornelia Falselove?” Roy Mega asked. “What is ‘is’?” asked Austro, looking like an owl. Advanced Lafferty. “The Funny Face Murders” is an important Lafferty story because of its commitment and compression. You can learn a lot about Lafferty from it, which is why it is a great story. It is definitely not great for those who want to stay far from Challenger Deep. Just one man’s opinion, but it is his hardest short story. It had to be. It tries to cancel every ontological part of the mystery short story, and it succeeds. Does this mean there is a story left? Yes, but only if you recognize it as a self-consuming artifact. I have a personal theory about FFF that may not convince many readers, but I encourage anyone who takes Lafferty seriously to consider what FFF is or who FFF is. Lafferty puts the challenge directly to the reader, so one ought to try to meet it. What I want to do in this post is to find a way into the story. The starting point has two parts: Roy and Austro. They are the only solid things here. We know them. We ought to hold onto them for dear life. If you are reading “The Funny Face Murders” for the first time or returning to it, I hope some of what I say here will be useful. How to approach it has been on my mind for a while. What follows is the best I can offer. The Funny Face (non)murders cannot be solved by conventional logic because justice requires subjects and objects. The story takes place in what we can call the Broken Bench Zone of Hybridity. If you color-coded the story’s sentences and scenes across its spectrum of being, the result would be clear. This is not a “whodunit,” but a “what-even-was-it?” The crime is an escalating series of hybrid states, and this will not make much sense unless you closely follow those transformations. That is why it matters so much that Judy consumes the trouble dissolver early in the story. She no longer has ballast, as she says. Lafferty is saying something Catholic : if you have no troubles, you have no self. It’s about suffering, about carrying the cross, about the idea that whoever wants to save his life will lose it. I cannot imagine that Lafferty did not think of 2 Corinthians 3:18 when he wrote this story. It is Aeschylus' "He who learns must suffer." This is the positive vision that FFF and new locations on Broken Bench Lane attack: There was a sign on a booth there that read Trouble-Dissolver Ten Cents a Large Glass.  Judy got a large glass of it and drank it off quickly. Because the story is so complex, I will handle it out of order and apply the min-max principle: minimize explanation and maximize insight. This means setting aside all the fun and important Shakespearean content. The mystery begins before the crime. Three husbands have “transitioned” from everyday life into a new kind of being through a Force of Corporate Creation. Somehow, this allows them to “slip out of their skin and bones” and move their identities into the “Corporate Composite Being” called False Face Flaherty, who also serves as their hiding place. The husbands do not die. They become the unseen minds living inside FFF. The “skin-and-bone boxes” they leave behind are their old, individual selves. The big murder moment occurs in a confused set of stabbings. The stabbings, though, are an act of ontological paradox in that they exist simultaneously on different planes of reality. On one hand, it is the physical destruction of an artificial entity that serves as a proxy for a discarded human identity, committed with a weapon that transforms from a toy into a lethal object. The whole thing slides across the Zone of Hybridity and the story's Reality Spectrum. We are in the world of Whitehead's actual occasions , where things are drops of experience. The victim’s identity is a chain of hybrid substitution. The abstract target is the conceptual identity of a husband, but the physical host is an engineered life form, such as a Basic Ape. This host becomes a "Living Wax Figure," on which a Funny Face pill applies the likeness of the discarded identity. This means that what is stabbed is a "Proxy Husk." It is an engineered life-form, disguised as an inanimate object, wearing a proxy face and containing the "Hybrid Substance," shuttling rubber and real blood. So what about the weapon transformation business? Not a random anomaly but a systemic feature of Broken Bench Lane's inventive chaos. A Dirky Dave Rubber Dagger starts  as soft inanimate matter, but the Transformative Force of the Lane's science alters its properties. Austro’s Dirky Dave Roulette game genre-style ratiocination shows this to be an institutionalized form of hybridity, a commercial system designed to produce ontologically unstable objects. The crime scene, Madame Gussaud's Wax Museum, is not neutral. As part of Broken Bench Lane, it is partly responsible for creating the mystery. It manifests as the Zone of Hybridity, a particularly effective sub-environment designed to dissolve certainty. How? By making the real indistinguishable from the artificial. That is a waxwork face. No, it is a human face. No, it is both, but it is neither; it is a funny face. With funny faces constantly popping out on figures that may or may not be alive, the museum is an Ambiguity Theater. You need something like this for a hybrid crime to occur without leaving a coherent trail of evidence. The confessions are, of course, necessarily unreliable. The suspects are not tethered down. The "fooling-around syndrome" is thus a Hybrid Motive, while the "compulsion to confess without a feeling of guilt" is a Hybrid Emotional state that burlesques moral action and the sacrament of reconciliation. Hybrid Agency is confirmed when Judy complains of her voice being hijacked. Personal will has become hybrid on the Broken Bench Lane, with beings acting as vessels for a collective, chaotic impulse that makes assigning specific culpability impossible.  In Arrive at Easterwine we learn that people are inside out. This is the Ultima Thule of that condition. One does not solve this mystery by finding a clear answer but by taking apart the hybrids involved. Roy and Austro break down False Face Flaherty and mentally unravel the chain of substitutions that led to the victimization. In the end, we get a Mexican Standoff because the investigation has worked. All the people involved are incomplete, hybrid boxes. Justice depends on identity conditions again because it requires clear subjects and objects, and those no longer obtain on Broken Bench Lane after FFF appears. That makes the Funny Face crime a perfect, and perfectly unsolvable, result of its own Broken Bench Lane Logic. As Austro asks, is there crime in criminality? What is, is ?

In the case of the Effigy History of Music and its author, there is a correspondence and mutual clarification between creation and creator that is not to be found in the Effigy History of Mountain s, for instance. With almost any musical instrument, Karl Effigy can play out the clarifications of the statements in his History of Music . But Karl Effigy can not, to the same extent, clarify the obscurities of his History of Oceans or his History of Continental Upthrusts . And yet he illuminates those subjects very powerfully also, going back and giving one the feel of adolescent oceans and of swampier continents. “Knowledge depends on the mode of the knower; for what is known is in the knower according to the measure of his mode.” — Thomas Aquinas Advanced Lafferty today. “ The Effigy Histories” is one of my favorite Lafferty stories. It is unusually clear about a view of history and knowledge that runs through much of Lafferty’s work. That view is often only latently present because he so frequently suspends the ordinary operations of historical process and knowledge-making. Today I want to work through some of that and explain how I relate it to difficult content in Laferty's misreading of history. Lafferty gives us Karl Effigy, a young man and former juvenile delinquent. Karl achieves immense fame with the publication of the Effigy Histories . They are a series of books covering topics ranging from music to mountains, happy fictions that create delight and a sense of apparent wisdom. They’re also factually inaccurate. Karl’s admirers see him as a person of infinite wisdom, with Arpad Arutoniv pointing to his perfect person-pattern. On the other hand, members of the Cosmo Club, to which most of the other geniuses in the story belong, are suspicious. Aren’t the Effigy Histories just a nonsensical art form? They think Karl’s sudden, comprehensive knowledge is some kind of illusion or fraud. Next, we learn the truth. The source of Karl’s abilities is two inventors, Clement Stringtown and Crowley Headcooper. The two scientists are specialists in brain-cobbling. This technique involves physically reshaping brain wrinkles to match the brain patterns of geniuses. We learn about two previous brain-cobbling experiments. Lafferty uses this to write two fun stories-within-the-story, one about The Boy With Rubber Muscles, who developed a physique without strength, and the other about a dolphin that invented a form of underwater algebra. And then we come to the creation of Karl Effigy. The two inventors took a young man from a minimum-security facility and imprinted his brain with the duplicate patterns of history's greatest scholars and artists. Skeptics eventually bring Effigy before the Cosmo Club for judgment. It is quickly determined that Karl is "deficient in Process." While Karl’s knowledge has the correct form, it lacks substance. The club orders Karl’s extinction. But there is a wrinkle when the sentence is interrupted by the arrival of federal marshals to arrest Karl. And then there is another wrinkle because the Feds are interrupted by an under-warden from the Alabaster Hills Juvenile Correctional Institute. The warden asserts his authority, and Karl goes back to where Stringtown and Headcooper found him. So what is really going on here? Karl Effigy has form without content. His brain has been pantographically impressed with the corrugations of great minds, shapes that correspond to wisdom. Lafferty tells us that the shapes are fossils, which makes them the residue of processes Karl never lived through. The geniuses from whom the person patterns come are tied to causal chains. They earned their brain corrugations. They struggled, erred, revised, and grew. Karl gets the endpoint without the journey, which is important to the story's view of history. As I’ve written about before on the blog, I see Lafferty as being a moderate foundationalist who likes to play games with extreme epistemological coherentism, the view that there is nothing beyond how our ideas hang together as a web of belief. So let’s step back and think about what history is for someone who holds a moderate foundationalist position. The most important part of this is testimony as a source of justification. Testimony conveys truth by being a non-basic but epistemically legitimate source of belief that rests on more fundamental grounds. It is justificatory, but non-basic because it is of secondary order. Testimonial beliefs are not justified in isolation. Instead, they are supported by background basic beliefs, such as perceptual awareness, memory, rational intuition, and revelation (capital “T” Traditional and personal, in Lafferty’s case), that provide defeasible reasons to trust speakers. How do you evaluate testimony, for instance, if you were to read something like one of Karl’s Effigy Histories ? The strength of the justification for believing it is true is influenced by factors including Karl’s reliability, sincerity, and epistemic competence, all of which stand on foundational resources. If the causal chain checks out, then testimony transmits truth without being infallible. Even here, its justificatory force is conditional. Counterevidence might arise. The takeaway is that moderate foundationalism preserves the epistemic importance of testimony while grounding its credibility in more basic forms of justification over the long term. Karl’s histories just lack all justification. Indeed, they are cut off from the most basic forms of justification, which is why the narrator tells us that they are “not accurate in any of their particulars.” They are described instead as happy fictions: pleasant, euphoric, and aesthetically coherent, but nonsense all the same. Yet they communicate with “strange clarity and luminosity” and possess “the inner coherence of great paintings.” The form seems to be doing all the work. We are therefore dealing with the question of aesthetic knowledge, if that phrase can even be allowed. We have to be, since there is no testimonial access to justified true beliefs about actual history. One can read an entire Effigy History and find nothing that conveys truth through the many forms of testimony historians use. You would see stuff that looked like it, but it would all be a mock-up. The question the story poses becomes: what can this form accomplish on its own? Lafferty works through a series of answers, making the story more than a set of tall tales organized around the novum of brain-cobbling. It becomes one of his more significant attempts to reflect on his hobby, history. In music, the logic of Effigy History suggests that form can do almost everything. (This is related to the demiurgic role of opera in The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny ). We are told that Karl received Gordon Whitecrow's Musical Mastery, and he can play. When something in Karl’s Effigy History of Music is obscure, he can pick up an instrument and demonstrate what he means. Lafferty goes to the trouble of giving this a marvellous description, a line of critical importance in the story. He calls it "correspondence and mutual clarification between creation and creator." The subject matter of music is something Karl can produce and reproduce. He can't prove his History is accurate, but he can show you the shape of what he has written about. With music, form demonstrates itself. I would sum this up by saying that Lafferty is isolating the strand of his epistemology in which understanding and justification arise not from propositional proof but from form itself as a self-demonstrating medium: truth is apprehended through productive enactment and correspondence between knower and creation, rather than through verification. Now we come to the natural histories. There are works by Karl on Mountains, Oceans, Continental Upthrusts, and so on, where form can only be intimate. Karl "illuminates those subjects very powerfully," giving readers "the feel of adolescent oceans and of swampier continents." How we read this will be interpretively important. One could read it as saying that there is something very worthwhile here. This is the sheer aestheticist pole of the Effigy Histories . I read it ironically and darkly: "illuminate" is more counterfiguration. It is more noetic darkening. Readers of Effigy history are not really being illuminated. They are being fed codswallops. It’s nonsense because Karl "can not, to the same extent, clarify the obscurities." That is what real histories do. We might wonder why Karl can't do this. Perhaps it is because Karl cannot produce a mountain. The subject matter of the natural histories lies outside him in massive causal chains involving countless multifactorial events he has no access to. The form of the mountain refers outward to content Karl just doesn't possess. This would be like Vico’s verum ipsum factum. Karl can indicate mountains; he cannot teach you about them from the inside. Lafferty gets in a good joke about Karl’s earth knowledge being a lot like his understanding of himself: adolescent. It is projective. Then we come to math. Arithmetic is Lafferty’s limit case. The big joke here is the one the story ends on. Karl is writing " The Effigy History of Seven Months Five Days And One Hour And a Half In The Klinker ," but his sentence is eighteen months. His counselor is worried about his arithmetic. Seven is not eighteen; no amount of aesthetic coherence bridges the gap. Pure particulars admit less clarification through aesthetic form. Jasper Johns’s 0 Through Nine is a painting of Arabic numerals, not of numbers, though if they measured anything, they would be numbers. Numbers are somehow what they are, and Karl doesn't know what they are. The gradient, then, I think, looks something like this: where form can demonstrate itself (music), Karl succeeds. Where form refers to external content (natural history), Karl is showy and immature. Where form becomes pure particular (arithmetic), Karl is a complete washout. Someone might think, "Come on now. Isn't the number the best example of pure form? How can you put it on the far end from music?" To this, all I can say is that Lafferty seems to do it, so I wouldn't read a Platonic account of number into him. As an objection, it seems to confuse what the story implies is aesthetic form (internal coherence and style) with ontological form (the nature of the thing). Lafferty emphasizes that Karl possesses the style of a mathematician, like the Dolphin who created underwater algebra, a perfect "being of reason" ( ens rationis ). Consider it this way. Thomistic metaphysics defines truth as adaequatio rei et intellectus , the conformity of the mind to reality. Lafferty uses this standard in his major distinction regarding the Effigy History of Music : "there is a correspondence and mutual clarification between creation and creator." That must be important for Enniscorthy Sweeny, too. In music, Karl is the creator, so the reality conforms to his mind because he is enacting it. Isomorphism. But in the case of the stubborn particular of the number eighteen, Karl is not the creator; that number is a measure of real historical time. His jail sentence is an objective "accident" of history, not a subjective projection of aesthetic will taking itself for or pretending to be knowledge. Because Karl is "deficient in Process," as Lafferty puts it—I would say cut off from the causal chain that links the mind to the external events of history in testimonial form—he cannot achieve conformity. The truth conditions for truth-based history are not met, so historical accuracy becomes a nonstarter. "The Effigy Histories" places human history between natural history and arithmetic. Like natural history, human history records events of a kind Karl cannot produce. In this sense, Karl Effigy is Enniscorthy Sweeny backwards (Lafferty wrote  The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny  about six months before he completed "The Effigy Histories.") Karl cannot demonstrate the French Revolution by performing it, nor does he have access to its process as transferred through the causal chains of testimony. Historical narrative refers outward to content: to particular events, particular people, particular dates. Karl might write an Effigy History of the English Middle Ages . That history might be bound in buckram, Smyth-sewn, and hand-finished, with deep texture, brilliant emplotment, exhilarating pseudo-insight, and thematic coherence. It would give you the feel of medieval England. But it would be dead wrong. It would be consensus history, with the history drained away. You would have the equivalent of the tank of water before the underwater algebra gets drained in the story. It would be nonsense. “Underwater Algebra is all wet,” Professor RodneyMuldoon spoke with incredible crassness. And Professor Plato Platorhinus spoke of it even more sharply at an International Seminar: “Drain all the water out of all the equations,” he barked. “Then see what you have left.” “How will we drain equations, Professor Platorhinus?” the Marshal of the Seminar asked in confusion. “Aw Dromedary drek! What do they make Seminar Marshals out of nowadays?” Professor Plato cried in anguish. “Rotate all the vector values ninety degrees clockwise and let the water run out of them.” It was done. And what they had left was simple dry-land mathematics such as toddlers study in high schools and colleges. Like arithmetic, history has its stubborn, non-aesthetic particulars. Henry II was crowned in 1154, not 1163. Seven is not eighteen. Against epistemological coherentism, no amount of aesthetic coherence makes a false date true, Lafferty seems to be saying. But history is more dangerous than arithmetic because the aesthetic form is more seductive and plays a far larger role. A history that gets the feel right but the facts wrong is a happy fiction (more irony). Some people will take to it instantly for all sorts of reasons, from artistic tastes to ideological pre-commitment to the many cognitive biases we are all prey to. Lies are harder to see through when given such splendid form. For Lafferty, the ultimate stakes of this must be religious. Christianity is a historical religion, and Catholicism preserves the most developed record of its truth, at least according to Roman Catholicism. Catholicism also makes claims about particulars. Suffered under Pontius Pilate  appears in the Creed: a time-stamp, a named Roman bureaucrat, a specific execution. The Incarnation is an event first, not a person pattern as Karl Effigy is. God enters history at a particular time, in a particular place, in a particular body. Had you been there, you would have seen it distributed across the brain’s regions and networks—what Lafferty turns into the wrinkles and valleys of the story. We can sloganzie it as The Incarnation can’t be pantographed. And you can’t pantograph a person into being the Incarnation. Whatever Lafferty’s satirical norm is, it will have an epistemology that protects this. That is how I see it. In “The Effigy Histories,” Lafferty appears to be working with a distinction between basic and non-basic beliefs. It isn’t that the story is claiming that knowledge requires personal experience (though that is how it imagines the philosophical problem through Karl), but that non-basic beliefs, such as those about history, are justified only insofar as they can be traced through intelligible testimonial or inferential chains back to basic belief-forming faculties like perception, memory, or reason. Karl Effigy’s defect is that he was confected in a way that cut the chain of epistemic ancestry. He is a history-making pseudo-golem who golems up history. His histories have the formal shape of knowledge, but they are not grounded in witness, memory, reliable testimony, or defeater-sensitive inference. This assumes that whatever plays the basic role must belong to an accountable knower whose belief-forming capacities are recognizably human and corrigible, rather than allowing that an opaque but reliable imprinting mechanism could itself count as a basic source. I think Lafferty actually creates a space for such an imprinting mechanism in his mysticism, especially in his oceanic mode, and that he provides a foundation for revelation and sacred doctrine beyond what moderate foundationalism allows on its own. He believes a narrow set of things are basic and incorrigible, but one of the rules he holds himself to as a writer of fiction is that he never preaches, so he never says this. That makes him an extremely weird moderate foundationalist, one who can appeal to both the whole-hog epistemic foundationalist and the radical anti-foundationalist. For the latter, the religious carve-outs in Lafferty can be treated as fantastical elements. They are hard-coded but less near the surface, buried by Lafferty’s usual games with counterfiguration, allusion, and so forth, much like some of the subtler worrying elements. For that reason, they are exceptionally easy to evade if one refuses to look. This is where Lafferty’s (sometimes justified) paranoid reading of history comes in. Karl Effigy's histories are "imposing bottles that have been emptied of all the liquor of fact and refilled with something else." They give off "luck and pleasant surprise and sheer delight." The counterfeit is indistinguishable from the real thing at the level of reception. One has to fact-check Karl at every point to break the mesmerism. Karl dazzles the usually contrarian Arpad Arutinov, one of Lafferty's jokes in the story. However, Diogenes Pontifex is suspicious. I think Lafferty's own view of bogus history is probably very much like Pontifex's: If a large meteor should light in the middle of my neighborhood, would it be worth my while to step outside and see it? If the meteor should knock my house askew so that my floor was at an angle of 38°, would it be worth my while to investigate? Oh no, I see that the room isn't really slanting at 38°. That's an illusion. Nevertheless, I just believe I'll step outside for a look at the meteor of the meteoric illusion. I understand that the meteoric phenomenon is named Karl Effigy. Pontifex understands that even when Karl Effigy’s history is seen for what it is, an illusion rather than a real meteor, it can still have cultural force and shape behavior. Fictionalized histories poison the present when they are believed by those unwilling to analyze stubborn particulars. As Lafferty writes, Karl Effigy’s “talk, if analyzed, has the mechanical element of a recording. But, left unanalyzed, it has the liveliness and humor of humanity at its best.” Now here is the hard part. Lafferty believed that the Holocaust was a formally coherent account—coherent enough to gain historical consensus at least. To that degree, for him, it is like Diogenes Pontifex's floor canted at an angle of 38°. "The Effigy Histories" can be read as an attempt to think through unmoored historical coherentism, in which narratives whose “facts and happenings differ from the facts and happenings in corresponding reality” nevertheless act as history, with only a few figures (like those in the Cosmo Club) recognizing that “some sort of switch has been made.” The Holocaust would be the kind of material that goes into an Effigy History of the Jews . It would have a shape imposed without reference to actual events. It would have an aesthetic form that "illuminates powerfully" and gives people "the feel of" something, but which is "wrong in every particular." It is not surprising that, only months later, Lafferty creates Enniscorthy Sweeny and Sweeny’s creations. When "The Effigy Histories" is read as a companion piece, The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny becomes two things. First, a masterpiece of authentic and Effigy -style history. And second, a magic eraser for what Lafferty sees as real-world Effigy history contaminating the twentieth century.

I refrain from writing "The End" here. It must not end. — "The Day After the World Ended" “C’mon, Justin,” came an ankle-high voice from a small lady, with the red-thread or fairy mark on her throat and with a Jewel-Bird egg in her navel. “These illuminated people get mighty murderous if you don't use their brand of light. They'll kill you. Let's go to the thirteenth. C’mon.” Today I want to look at Lafferty’s “The Emperor’s Shoestrings,” a fun story that doesn’t get much attention. I also want to use it to step back to a larger question that matters for reading Lafferty in general: the much-remarked, pervasive presence of death in his work—and the puzzle everyone eventually chews on. Why is death in Lafferty not the miserable thing it is in most other writers? At the end of the post, I’ll include a first-pass resource on what I take to be a recurring pattern in his fiction: definalization. Definalization is bigger than death—death is just where it shows up most dramatically, since nothing is more experientially final than dying. In most fiction, death enforces closure: a character exits narrative space, or returns only in restricted forms through memory. Definalization displaces that kind of closure. It breaks the “death = narrative punctuation” rule and reopens the board, giving the story new lines of action: “A one-handed man named Buford Cracksworthy, in a moment of panic, had lopped off his own head. "Here, here, here," the chief of the WHEW crew cried. "That isn't allowed at all." "Oh boy oh boy oh boy!" the severed head moaned in severe unease. In "The Emperor's Shoestrings," Lafferty gives us Justin Saldeen. Justin is a birdwatcher attending a convention of the Nuthatches and Related Birds Watchers of America, or NRBWA. The NRBWA is as much a parafascist cult as it is a hobbyist organization. It is devoted to what it calls the “Little Vision” and enforced through constant loyalty tests. Members must punctuate every statement with the nuthatch’s cry, “yauk, yauk.” Everyone congratulates everyone else on their powers of perception. Justin’s companions, Rolf Mesange, Berthold Chairmender, and others, are strict adherents of the yauk-yauk code. Justin, being a Lafferty hero, becomes distracted. He notices something his peers either cannot see or refuse to see: a gathering of small people beneath a table. Despite skepticism and hostility from the other birdwatchers, Justin is drawn toward the little folk. He makes contact with a woman who bears a thin red line around her throat. She invites him to join them on the hotel’s non-existent thirteenth floor. There is a great deal of vertical movement in the story, and for Lafferty, a mythographer if ever there was one, vertical movement is never incidental. It tells us about higher and lower things. Convention members shuttle between the fourteenth-floor roof garden and the twelfth-floor theater, missing what matters entirely, the small kingdom of the little folk. Justin, by contrast, becomes fascinated by the hotel’s in-between spaces, the small cubbyholes lodged between floors. They remind him of lantern compartments from a childhood train ride, little recesses you only notice if you are looking for what does not quite belong to the main architecture. While the rest of the group attends lectures on “re-entrant space,” Justin disappears into one of these interstitial spaces, his feet left sticking out of the opening. This creates institutional pressure. Rolf will lose his NRBWA standing if he cannot account for Justin. Eventually, Rolf finds Justin’s shoes, and the group drags him back into conventional reality to face a scheduled judgment. Enter the judge-advocate, humorless and dead to spirit. He accuses Justin of “deficiency” for his association with the small kingdom. Picking up an earlier conversation about Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” Justin offers a different reading of the tale. The child did not merely discover that the Emperor was naked. He discovered that the Emperor had willingly removed his shoes to walk barefoot on the holy ground of the invisible kingdoms. This is the didactic core of the story. The judge rejects the defense. All small kingdoms must be denuded; they must be visibly integrated into the larger order. The confrontation breaks out into chaos as the little people manifest openly, and Justin sides with their hidden reality. It is at this point that the group notices Justin himself bears the red mark around his throat. The discovery reveals that he is not just joining the murdered. He has been one of them all along. “The Emperor’s Shoestrings” is, in many ways, a fairly straightforward Lafferty story. It affirms the invisible and sacramental dimensions of reality. It teaches lessons Lafferty teaches often, from “Boomer Flats” to “The Man Who Lost His Magic.” As usual, he sides with imagination and with life, a familiar affirmation. I want to set it aside here and attend instead to a concrete detail in the story, the red line around the throats of the little folk. Death is puzzling in Lafferty. His fiction is a jolly abattoir, and at times death carries real weight—the kind we’re used to. But while there are brutal, stony deaths in Lafferty, more often death is less grim than it is in almost any other writer. In other words, death doesn’t organize attention the way it does in most fictional patterns. In most stories, death draws things together: it pulls the narrative toward closure. It quilts the text down. It gives the reader the sense that what has happened adds up to a terminus. Death is summative, and theme is summative, so death becomes a high road to the interpretability of theme. It just doesn’t work that way in Lafferty. When we read him, we don’t worry about characters dying, because death doesn’t act as a thematic punctuation mark—at least not in the usual way. In Lafferty, death is a heightened instance of something more general and more philosophical: the loosening of endings of every kind. He pushes the final moments—the death moments—into the center of attentional space, only to strip them of finality. And then he presses on, going where other writers stop. This is definalization where death becomes a blood-clotted knot of meaning that indexes his other strategies of definalization—enabling strategies, the ones that make his strange architectures possible. There is resurrection, the simplest way around death. There is ghostly persistence. There is the bending of time. Parts outlive the whole: a head is lobbed off and talks. Lost states return, often improbably. In Lafferty, death intensifies something more general: again, the loosening of endings of every kind. He puts the moment of death at the center of attention, then strips it of finality and keeps going. That is definalization. Death becomes a blood-clotted knot of meaning because it concentrates the techniques by which his stories undo closure—resurrection, ghostly persistence, bent time, parts that outlive wholes, lost states that return, and so on. Simply put, death makes definalization visible. In “The Emperor’s Shoestrings,” definalization takes the form of an image. It is the red thread, “the mark sometimes affected by those who have been murdered.” Lafferty repeatedly calls this throat mark on the little people a “thread,” and by the end of the story, it becomes a counterimage of the titular shoestrings. Where the shoestrings signify the bindings of the Big Vision, what the emperor tosses aside when he steps on holy ground, the red thread stands in for sensitivity to spiritual realities. It shows that the tie to the self-professedly rational world has been cut. The little lady warns Justin that “these illuminated people get mighty murderous if you don’t use their brand of light. They’ll kill you.” That is about as Lafferty a sentence as one is likely to find. Within the birdwatching metaphors of the story, to bear the red line on the throat is therefore to be un-nested, released from the truly lethal rules of the Big Vision. It frees one to move through the crawlspaces, where the world opens into “murder comedies and haunt skits.” There is a phrase in the story that beautifully captures this: “murdered but active.” Here, the blocking figure is the judge-advocate, the murderous enforcer who ensures that the scandal of something like definalization is not even recognized. He is a flat character, even by Lafferty’s standards—a mouthpiece for a settled world in which everything is accounted for. Yet when Lafferty lets the little folk parody him at the end of the story, the judge comes to life. He’s animated, as if by contact with something more living, a terrific image for what the story is out to accomplish: The judge-advocate strode up and down the area inexasperation with his hands locked behind him. A muchsmaller man strode behind him, exactly taking off hismotions and attitudes. There were several of the othersmall persons japing about, but nobody looked at themmuch. And, really, they were not much to look at: they wereall quite small; they all had that thread-thin red line aroundtheir throats; and they all had funny faces. The thin red line at the throat is a badge of definalization. It says that endings are meretricious—even if violence is not—and that the world keeps generating side-spaces and afterlives that no single, comprehensive vision can control.

From Salvador Dali's The Elephants (1948)      When a topos has acquired sufficient ornamentation, it is blessed, or it is cursed. If it is blessed, it becomes one of the Holy Lands. If it is cursed, we don’t know what it becomes. The Three Armageddons of Enniscorty Sweeny About that time, the mad cartoonist J. P. Dordogne invented just such an animal in his comic strip. It was a big, comical, rock-eating animal. It struck the popular fancy and humor at once, though it did not at once put anything into the popula r stomach. It was a shambling hulk of an animal, good-natured and weird. It ate earth a nd rocks and anything at all. It didn’t even need vegetation, or water. It grew peculiarly fat on such feeding. "Dorg" Some unorganized thoughts from my Lafferty notebook. Lafferty completed "Dorg" on February 1, 1970, and it first appeared in Orbit 10  (1972). Here's the plot. The world faces an existential food crisis. In response, an excitable government remedial ecologist assembles an unlikely team: a shrewish representative of Amalgamated Youth (its mandatory), a mad cartoonist, and a half-mad psychologist. Behind the project is an audacious belief—that art, grounded in the primal act of naming, can generate new life. This time, creation might offer a cure for hunger. Before the story opens, the cartoonist, J. P. Dordogne, has already imagined a creature that eats rocks. He draws it, calls it the "dorg," and it catches the public’s attention. Then, in a remote stretch of Oklahoma, the dorg is spotted. Talihina, Oklahoma The team flies to the site ("Riddle landed the plane in tall grass near Talihina, Oklahoma, and the four dorg-seekers got out"). They discover the impossible is fact: the dorg exists. From the male dorg comes a female, an allusion to Genesis—this time assisted by a rustic with a Bowie knife. The dorg multiply, and for a short while, world hunger vanishes. Then, without warning, the dorg begin to die off. The world is once again in trouble.. The Junoesque representative from Amalgamated Youth intimidates the psychologist into proposing a solution. The bureaucrats press the cartoonist—now institutionalized, his mind already gone—to keep drawing dorgs. Pregnant males, with larger and larger bellies, until the bellies drag the ground. The team hopes that Dorgone's demiurgic imagination might revive the species and save the world. When reading the story, keep the Lascaux caves in mind. Cave art from Lascaux That said, something doesn’t quite come off in “Dorg.”The Tulsa archives reveal that Lafferty rewrote its ending, possibly out of dissatisfaction, eventually settling on a solution that felt more right. In my opinion, the final version doesn't work, which makes me curious about the earlier drafts and the revision process. For those of us who see the œuvre as a single, continuous thing, it is clear that pieces of the underlay come through with more clarity in some places than in others. “Dorg” ends up saying both more and less than it wants to, though it’s very funny in parts. First, something obvious, then two things a little more subtle. Lafferty is riffing on the postwar Shmoo craze —the satirical peak of Al Capp’s Li’l Abner.  That influence is ambient, not structural. Even so, it helps to keep the story with the celebrated newspaper run. You miss something if you don't, namely that the Dorg project is doomed from the start. And the dorg is a melancholy shmoo, with the Winding Star Mountains of Oklahoma being a variant of the original Shmoon Valley. Abner kills his first Shmoo Second, I think Lafferty went back to “Dorg” when he wrote The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny . There, he gives the monad behind the idea its full expression. If this is right, then a rounded reading of “Dorg” would compare it to the role of cartooning in that novel, culminating specifically in how the cave illustrations at Lascaux, in the Dordogne province of France, connect with the paper on the ungrund Ennis writes in November 1916. This para-text is so central to understanding Lafferty as a whole that, if a Lafferty course existed, it would deserve a prominent place and warrant deep analysis. For those wanting to go deep into “Dorg,” I would implore reading Sweeny’s essay and think about what Lafferty says about the Pan-Therium—then reconsider “Snuffles,” and a hundred other things in Lafferty. Third, is the Hebrew word tardemah , the sleep that God casts over Adam before creating Eve from his rib: “The Tardemah, the deep sleep,” Riddle said reverently. “I should have guessed it.” Tardemah appears about half a dozen times in the Hebrew Scriptures, usually at moments of great consequence, most notably after the creation of Eve and during the Abrahamic covenant. While translated as “deep sleep,” the word has other usages connected with madness, prophecy, and false prophecy. These meanings link it to the cartoonist Dorgone’s mental breakdown and to psychologist Riddle’s idea that the “dorg” is a work of harbinger art, art that prophesies, and to the physical birth of the dorg. In other words, prophecy, madness, creation, the big themes of  The Three Armageddons, where we see Lafferty’s " tardemah " in its full manifestation. So, while “Dorg” is an amuse-bouche , it connects with the major themes of his late career: the overlap of cartooning and primitivism, the creative act as an ontological rupture, the exhaustion of artistic forms in the twentieth century, the wellsprings of art and faith, and the relationship of man to animal. This is the dangerous side of Rocky McCrocky. I’ll wrap up with an Easter egg. The twelve-year-old creator kid, the J. P. Dordogne figure that Enniscorthy Sweeny alludes to in his 1916 essay, is Salvador Dalí (born in 1904)—an artist who straddled fine art, cartooning, and animation (including work with Disney). To this day, you can visit the Dalí Teatre and Museum in Figueres, Spain. Here is Dordogne’s madness from the inside, a searchlight thrown onto the half-lit world creative of Lascaux, super-charged with tardemah and perhaps Dali's " paranoaic-critical method ": When, in Scripture, Joseph’s sheaf rose up (that happened on this same flat rock earth that is the situs or topos ) and remained standing, and his brothers’ sheaves bowed down to it, that was a dream-becoming-flesh, and it triumphed over the rival dreams. When in Pharo’s dream (it also was on that same flat, rock-and-mud earth again, though Pharo describes it as a half-developed place on ne banks of the Nile among reed-grass) the ugly, thin cows ate up the seven sleek, fat ones, that was another selection-by-combat of what wouid be part of the emerging world and what would not be. I often wonder how we would be today if the fat cows had eaten up the skinny ones. The flat, rock-mud area is the basic arena; it is the topos or location of the unconscious, and also of all of the limbi or border lands. At the present time there is a twelve year old boy in Figueras in Spain who paints this topos , this floor of the unformed and the unconscious every day. This is the uncluttered and primordial earth, and it looks like a mauve pavement. The twelve-year-old Catalan boy paints this landscape as inhabited by a few flat panthers and bears and bearcats, flattened as if melted down - to the flatness of pancakes. The flat beasts are draped limply over the folded and stepped flatness of the land. The paintings are of the early mornings, so shadows are thrown in contradictory directions from dawn and false-dawn (there is a selection-by-combat between them also). It is in the early mornings that these proto-beasts are as flat and limp as melted paper, for it is then that they have belched themselves empty of dreams. These dreams or eructations are painted as flying in the low air with their vulture heads and bat-wings, or canvas-and-strut wings. This topos , this unadorned and unconscious flatland, is subject to change; but the changes are very contingent for a long time. If hills are wanted, they are dragged in on skids by creatures pulling them with ropes. If mountains are required, they are rolled in on wheels or log rollers. This is analogous to the geological mountain-bringing process. The mountains always come in on easy-flowing extrusions that are really wheels or rollers of magma. When a topos has acquired sufficient ornamentation, it is blessed, or it is cursed. If it is blessed, it becomes one of the Holy Lands. If it is cursed, we don’t know what it becomes. Even in their first form, the lands are not quite flat. There are the ledges from which the statuary stones are quarried. There are the clay-pits from which the red adam-clay is taken and from which Pan-Therium came. But the topos still maintains the appearance of flatness or of stepped flatness. ( Apocalypses , 256-257)

In my understanding of how Lafferty’s fiction fits together, I group his otherwise uncategorizable genre novels under the term "Oceanic Novels," adapting one of Lafferty's terms. They play with the idea of transcending history to explore the exteriorized unconscious—encompassing both the psychological unconscious and what Fredric Jameson called the political unconscious. The novels are ocreanic because the low mimetic cannot carry the eschatological intensity that Lafferty wants to explore. Genre work opened a line of flight. There’s an uncharitable reading of his artistic trajectory that sees him moving from a vision of contributing chapters to the American novel and other relatively low mimetic experiments to channeling the bulk of his creative energy into compensatory fantasies and satires. That’s not my view, but I can see how a case could be made. What I recently referred to as the  Big Egg Problem  attempts to specify the writerly challenge Lafferty faced in transitioning from the low mimetic to the anagogical. It occurred to me that one of his finest short stories stages the dynamic. It begins in dissatisfaction with the low mimetic and its tendency to flatten the representational possibilities of fiction. The story is “Configuration of the North Shore,” collected in the most recent Centipede Press volume and among Lafferty’s best. It’s an X-ray of the Big Egg Problem: how does one arrive at transcendence in fictional form? The story follows John Miller, a man haunted for decades by recurring dreams of a mysterious place called the North Shore, and Robert Rousse, the analyst who agrees to help him explore them. In a note on the story, Lafferty explained that it was based on a series of dreams he had experienced going back to his wartime service. “This story had its origin in a series of watery dreams, some times delightful, sometimes dire and dangerous, that I had when I was a soldier in the South Pacific during World War Two. Each of them was a sort of quest dream, and each of them contained part of the vision of the North Shore. To get to the North Shore it self I’d have to die, and I was unwill ing to do this. And I didn’t want to lose the rich dream con tent either.” Each dream in “Configuration of the North Shore” transpires in ritual stages: first, a grounding “Earth Basic” scene; then, a symbolic precursor dream; and finally, the central quest—across oceans, islands, and guardians—toward the elusive shore that always lies just beyond reach. As Rousse records Miller’s sessions, he becomes increasingly entangled through a kind of metaphysical countertransference, first encouraging, then prolonging the dreams using psychological technology via his booth. This backfires, collapsing Miller’s vision into the banality of his own city (the stickiness of the low mimetic) and leaving him enraged, convinced the dream has been spoiled forever. But Rousse, now obsessed, undertakes the journey himself, following the oceanic logic through the watery abyss, past the emperor penguin, the leviathan, and the monokeros, until he crosses the final stele marked “Which None May Read and Return” and enters the North Shore, a place of transcendence from which there is no return.

“Chombo” is a cunning boxing story, done Lafferty style. Our title character is a fighter living as a brush-cutter in the chaparral. He turns down an offer from his promoter, Doc Guzik, for a sanctioned fight. "I don’t believe I’ll fight in the states any more," Chombo says, preferring to "stay down here in the chaparral and just cut brush." When Doc questions his identity ("Isn't that Jerome?"), Chombo deflects: "My English is very faulty." His training regimen includes running thirty miles a day under a hundred pounds of brush, kicking a peccary to death, and fighting a puma on a cliff ledge. He tells Doc he is turning down the fight because he has a feeling he "had better stay on this side of the border for a few weeks right now." Enter Big Ben Bagby, another promoter (there will be a twist), who approaches Doc to arrange a fight between Doc’s “light Mexican boy” and a maverick he represents named Jerry Camus. Doc agrees and drives into the chaparral, telling Chombo, "I'll put my shirt and my house on you. I know you can whip him." Chombo agrees to the fight upon hearing the name Jerry Camus. He says, "I know Jerry pretty well, Doc. He's a very good boy." But Chombo can handle him. He warns Doc that the fight might be a trap and to be careful. On the night of the big fight, Chombo arrives disguised as one of the Ironhead Indians, wearing a conical hat and a red poncho over his trunks. Revealing himself to be blue-eyed and laughing, he asks Doc, "Am I Chombo? . . . and where is Jerry?" Confusion erupts when Big Ben introduces the opposing fighter—a large, heavy man—as “Chombo.” The blue-eyed fighter calmly tells Doc, "No, Doc, he isn't . . . I am." In the ensuing fight, Doc begs his fighter to lose because his money is on the other man, but Chombo refuses: "If I knew how to let anyone else win I wouldn't be a border jumper without a name." Before a later round, Chombo points out three men in the crowd who are there to arrest him and tells Doc that the lights going out is part of a plan. The lights go dark. Then they’re back on. The fighter has vanished from the ring. Big Ben, it turns out, is has a warrant for the arrest of Jerry Camus on an old manslaughter charge. And it is soon discovered that the strongbox with the prize money has been stolen. Later, Chombo calls Doc and explains the entire scheme: the other fighter’s name was also Jerry Camus, and the event was a setup to steal the strongbox while Doc was jumping up and down on it. He adds, "Tell Big Chombo I'm sorry I had to hurt him. But he didn't have any business borrowing my name, just because it happens to be his own." From Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Croxley Master”  (1907) and Jack London’s gritty boxing tales, through Ring Lardner’s “Champion”  (1916), the pulp energy of H. C. Witwer’s The Leather Pushers  (1919–1920), Ernest Hemingway’s great fight stories of the 1920s, and Robert E. Howard’s Sailor Steve Costigan  brilliant hack work of the 1930s—alongside the colorful ringside sketches of Octavus Roy Cohen and Damon Runyon—boxing fiction has always fascinated me. One of my favorite writers is the incomparable A. J. Liebling, whose The Sweet Science  (1956) is unmatched in its classical excellence. Last week, a colleague asked me about Norman Mailer, and I had to qualify my answer because of Mailer’s involvement in boxing and political journalism: the man wrote some truly great essays on the sport, especially  The Fight (1975). It’s a shame that a once-great literary genre now looks spent in the age of mixed martial arts. Still, if you’re anything like me and love the sweet science, you really ought to read “Chombo.”  Though it is ostensibly a boxing story, it's really a heist tale disguised as one. What impresses me most isn’t its border atmosphere or its depiction of a low-rent fight world, but its intricate, clockwork plotting. The story builds the familiar expectations of a classic sports showdown, only to subvert them through reversals. The boxing ring, we discover, is not an arena but a stage, and the fight itself a calculated, if pummeling, misdirection. The various elements, from the opponent’s identity to the timed power outage, fit neatly into its swindle. The protagonist is far more than a mere fighter, in at least two senses. Viewed through Lafferty’s development as a writer, the fighter is one of those early “exteriorized schizo-gashes,” from before Lafferty had built the ingenious narrative machinery he would later engineer to handle the theme. In that sense, the fighter recalls “Other Side of the Moon,” only this time the main character isn’t an arrant fool. Both stories come from Lafferty’s induction period, when he was working with doubleness and double worlds in more conventional ways. I wonder if Lafferty worked out the limits of that approach by writing stories like “Chombo” and “Other Side of the Moon,” arriving at his later permutations through an assessment of genre limits. On another level, the fighter isn’t a simple person because he’s a true Lafferty hero, part McGilly, a strategist and con artist whose brains are more important than his brawn. Though he first looks like a mark, one drawn into a bad match by Doc, he is in fact the architect of the whole affair, walking into a trap he has already repurposed to his own advantage. The fight is rigged, but the blue-eyed fighter rigs it on his own terms, a twist on stories going back to London’s The Abysmal Brute  (1913), where the fascination is the power game both inside and outside the ring. Jerry manipulates everyone around him. He turns their assumptions and their greed against them. It’s surprising that “Chombo” remains unpublished and missed the cut when the early stories were getting attention from small presses, given how good it is. It’s early Lafferty, but it has sharp dialogue and plays out as a taut thriller. As in another early heist story, “Johnny Crookedhouse” (1957), the man who thinks he is the smart one is the dupe.

And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. — Genesis 1:6 Then came the clear instant . . . when it was shattered completely and the blue sky was seen supreme. The unpatterned primordial water in "Love Affair with Ten Thousand Springs"  has me thinking about Lafferty’s short story "Encased in Ancient Rind,” a pretty gloomy piece in the felix culpa  tradition. Both the Fall and the Flood have already happened. That is quite bad, but it is usually what has already happened in a Lafferty. Here, however, Lafferty is working within a deeply Augustinian perspective: fault transfigured into a greater good. The image through which this fault is expressed is remarkable, not only in that it occurred to Lafferty to use it at all, but also in how he uses it. Most of this post will be an attempt to understand this conceit, which is the brilliant, clear, dry-day blue of the sky itself. Again, for the story to take place, two judgments must have been meted out to humanity: first the Fall, and then the Flood. They are in the background, and without them, there would be no cerulean expanse and no bow in the cloud. One of Lafferty’s techniques here is to quote passages as if they were appearing from nowhere, with Sally chiming in. The effect creates an extradiegetic overlay of human voice over a story driven by conversation. This voice-on-voice technique is a modernist device I always associate with Eliot's The Waste Land , but Lafferty uses it well. An example that will come across as perhaps too strong unless one has watched Lafferty earn it by what comes before: There were other vestiges that hung like words in the fog and rank dew of the world. "And the name of the star is called Wormwood." "In the brightness of the saints, before the day-star." "It was the star-eater who came, and then the sky-eater." "And the stars are not clear in his sight," said Job. "Poor Job,’ said Sally." The story shifts among ashy, foggy, and misty, reflecting the imagined carbon cycle at its core. The narrative is constructed as voices overheard, encouraging the reader to listen in on conversations. Some characters in the ongoing dialogue lose their memories of the world they've left behind and enter the new world with the rind, making his narrative another meditation on remembering. Each of the story's three parts begins with a lyric by O'Hanlon. One such lyric, “may my right hand wither yet / if I forget the sky,” echoes Psalm 137:5 (“If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning”), linking remembering the sky to the act of sacred remembrance itself. The ancient rind of the title refers to the renewed or second formation of the heavenly waters—those that God separates in Genesis 1:6-7—creating a world shielded by water. Living under the rind leads some characters to forget the sky. It creates their sky amnesia. In my post on "Love Affair with Ten Thousand Springs," I discussed Tiamat, a figure of the primordial, undifferentiated waters. Scholars addressing theodicy have found in that cosmology a chaos, or potential for evil, that is inherent in the world's materials.  That is how it works in the Mesopotamian epic Enûma Elišh. The sky forms when the ocean-goddess Tiamat is split, and the lower and upper waters are created. The blue sky arises from the separation of upper and lower waters: Marduk stretches part of Tiamat's body to create the vault of heaven, which holds back the upper waters: Then the lord rested, gazing upon her dead body, While he divided the flesh of the … , and devised a cunning plan. He split her up like a flat fish into two halves; One half of her he established as a covering for heaven. He fixed a bolt, he stationed a watchman, And bade them not to let her waters come forth. Enuma Elish , Tablet IV Genesis 1 also has the two waters. A dome-like firmament restrains a celestial ocean by separating “waters from waters.” What Lafferty does is take the blue sky that would have appeared when the body of Tiamat was riven and stretched, and reserve its appearance for  after  the canopy of the upper waters has fallen in Genesis 6-9. It may be worth pausing over this. Lafferty does it differently. He withholds the blue of the sky from the point where almost everyone else places it, that is, in the separation of the lower waters from the heavenly waters. In  Enûma Eliš , the blue sky appears when the upper waters are commanded not to come forth; in Lafferty, there is no blue sky at that moment because the ancient rind still remains, an aqueous canopy. This is where things become slightly complicated. You see, I have cheated by letting Lafferty have his version of the whole account. There are long Jewish and Christian traditions that do not imagine the upper waters falling in the deluge of the Flood. In some medieval accounts, for instance, the upper waters are fixed at the limit of creation itself. I will include a timeline so it is clear how what later came to be called the canopy theory of the upper waters fits into and departs from these older cosmological schemes of the heavenly waters. Suffice it to say that there is a tradition in which the canopy of the upper waters of Genesis 1:6 does break, and it becomes the mechanism of the Flood. In the 1960s, Isaac Newton Vail’s nineteenth-century version of this kind of canopy theory reappeared, tidied up by apologists, with some of its lunacy incised and drained. In The Waters Above the Firmament , also published as The Earth’s Annular System : The Mosaic Record Scientifically Explained , Vail (1840–1912) argued that the Earth was once surrounded by Saturn-like rings, which he called annular canopies. These rings collapsed in stages, producing catastrophic events, events Vail used to "explain" phenomena such as the Flood and major fossil-burial episodes. He also used the theory to explain the extraordinary longevity of the patriarchs, who were said to have lived under the primordial canopy of the heavenly waters. Vail, The Earth's Annular System (108) In 1961, John C. Whitcomb and Henry M. Morris published The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and Its Scientific Implications . If one of the reasons Vail wrote The Waters Above  was to undermine the uniformitarianism of geologists like Charles Lyell, who thought that Earth’s history was largely catastrophe-free and that uniform processes accounted for geologic history, then The Genesis Flood  was a return of Christian Catastrophism, a meteor-like event in American religious culture. The book became hugely influential. It was thumped at the pulpit and spread wide and far through popular Christian culture. If one attended a Christian school in the 1980s (I know, because I was there), one would almost certainly have heard about canopy theory. There would have been nifty drawings explaining it. Lafferty read The Genesis Flood , and he was convinced by it. “Encased in Ancient Rind” is where his belief in the canopy shows up most clearly in his fiction. Lafferty's story begins during a global environmental crisis. Extreme pollution has reached a critical mass, causing widespread death by suffocation. A group of intellectuals (the “mentality set”), some of whom don’t quite cut it, meet for dinner at the Mountain Top Club. The group includes Harry Baldachin (a baldachin is a canopy), Clement Flood, Charles Broadman, and a young actress named Sally Strumpet. Baldachin and Flood are the villains of the story, and Lafferty has fun showing that, no matter the historical conditions, these two will be on the wrong side of interpreting them. They believe humanity is on the brink of total extinction. Against this view are Broadman and Sally. They believe they are not dying but are instead physically changing. They are gaining weight and developing thicker features. Broadman says that the group will meet again in exactly one hundred years, a proposal that Baldachin and Flood find improbable since they expect to be dead. Thus ends section one. “By your voice I know that there's a thickening of the pharynx,” Charles said. “By your swollen hands I know that there is already a thickening of the metacarpals and phalanges, not to mention the carpals themselves. Your eyes seem unnaturally deep-set now as though they had decided to withdraw into some interior cave. But I believe that it is the thickening of your brow ridges that makes them seem so, and the new bulbosity of your nose. You've been gaining weight, have you not?” Section two begins one hundred years later. The same four people reunite at the club. The Earth has been transformed by a canopy of water vapor and carbon that has moved into the upper atmosphere. This created a global greenhouse with no wind, rain, or direct sunlight. The world is now filled with giant plants and neo-saurians. Humans have gained longevity, potentially living up to a thousand years. At the same time, they have become pachydermous, with thickened bones and features. They resemble Neanderthals. Sally is now one hundred and seventeen years old. She says she is finally fertile and plans to marry an aviator who illegally flies above the canopy to see true colors and the sun. Section two ends. Section three begins after another century has passed. The group meets one last time. Sally brings her husband. He is an outlaw pilot who argues that the short, happy life of the old world was superior to the stagnant, century-long prison beneath the canopy. Baldachin and Flood, now heavily adapted to the slow, gray world, try to have the younger couple arrested by ponderous guards. Sally and her husband invite Broadman to join them as they escape. Unfortunately, Broadman finds he is too physically thickened to move quickly enough to reach their craft (the Swift Wisdom ). Sally and her husband escape through the canopy into the sunlight. Two slow tears roll down Broadman’s pachydermous face. At the center of the story is the reappearance of the raqia  of Genesis. In an argument with Ed Babinski, Lafferty had an idiosyncratic philological critique of the scholarly consensus that the Hebrew raqia  denotes a solid, "hammered-out" vault ( raqa ). The consensus view is that using raqia  to denote a sphere is a later development of the word; it is what happened to the word raqia  when it encountered Greek cosmology. Lafferty said this is "etymology-fiction" and "Hebraistry-fiction." Then Lafferty used a version of Ben-Yehuda’s seminal Hebrew dictionary to argue his case. He said, look, the adjectival form of the word. Ben-Yehuda says it means spherical . Therefore, it is warranted that we believe the Genesis author possessed a sophisticated, non-primitive understanding of geocentric spheres. Lafferty to Ed Babinski Then Lafferty integrated this linguistic claim into the vapor canopy model popularized by Henry M. Morris, where the "waters above" are a series of Vail-inspired mantles. Lafferty then went full canopy-endorser, saying he believes the modern ionosphere is the "remnant of the broken-up raqia -sphere." That makes the ionosphere the atmospheric vestige of a once-contiguous aqueous envelope. The collapse of the upper water mantle caused the Noachian Flood and altered Earth’s primordial climate. Lafferty draws heavily on Whitcomb and Morris throughout: So much for the sources. But why? I think it has to do with an easily overlooked Christological dimension hidden in the story it. The raqia  sphere would have existed since the second day of creation until the flood. Only after the flood would the blue sky be revealed. This would have caused the shortening of lifespans and the appearance of modern-looking men. Lafferty is clear that the thickening of features is not just turning into saurians or pachyderms, but becoming more Neanderthal. As you probably know, the felix culpa  is the happy fault, all the joys that came after the Fall, but that are redeemed through the coming of Christ. The phrase comes from the Exsultet  (the Easter Proclamation). It is a hymn sung during the Catholic Easter Vigil with the line: "O felix culpa, quae talem ac tantum meruit habere Redemptorem" ("O happy fault, which gained for us so great a Redeemer"). Lafferty’s use of the blue sky in “Incased in Ancient Rind” is an application of the felix culpa  because of how he imagines the rind. The rind is rooted in a specific theological timeline of the vapor canopy: the canopy began as a prelapsarian "transient backdrop" created on Day Two (the only day God did not call good). After the Fall of Man, it transformed into a postlapsarian prison of "Slow Wisdom." The characters in the story are in the position of the patriarchs. They are in a postlapsarian state, a gray, stagnant "ancient rind" that grants long life and denies the "bright death sword" of the sun. The second "fortunate fall" coincided with the destruction of the ancient rind: canopy is shattered, the Deluge happens. This shortened human life; yet it was fortunate. It opened the blueness of the sky, revealing color and grace. It was first put there very early, on the second day, as a matter of fact. You likely do not remember that the second day is the one that God did not call good. It was surely a transient and temporary backdrop that was put there to be pierced at the proper times by early death and by grace. One of the instants it was pierced was just before this present time. It had been breached here and there for short ages. Then came the clear instant . . . when it was shattered completely and the blue sky was seen supreme. Within the story, the blue sky and the rainbow function as tokens of anamnesis, set against the amnesia that comes from living inside the modern rind. Sally and her late fertility clearly recapitulate Sarah, pregnant with Isaac at ninety. But who is the aviator husband? It is hard to work out a strict parallel, beyond noting that he is married to Sally, who herself figures as a kind of wisdom-as-bride. What matters more is his choice. He would rather die younger than thicken into amnesia. In this regard, it is interesting that in the story characters move from smoke, ash, fog, and other pollution to mist and mead on Wednesdays, as if echoing Ash Wednesday. Preferring an early death with the blue sky intact is, of course, the kind of decision made by Christ—and by those in Past Master  who choose to live in Cathead, which is a large measure of what Cathead is about. Better to be crucified than to blaspheme against the Holy Spirit. That, of course, is why most readers cannot take Cathead seriously: Cathead is incomprehensible against a horizon that lacks the theological virtues. Lafferty puts it extremely well in "Encased in Ancient Rind": “The short and happy life, that is the forgotten thing. The blue-sky interval — do you know what that was? It was the bright death sword coming down in a beam of light. Do you know that in the blue-sky days hardly one man in ten lived to be even a hundred years old? But do you know that in the blue-sky days it wasn't sealed off? The sword stroke was a cutting of the bonds. It was a release and an invitation to higher travel. Are you not tired of living in this prison for even two hundred years or three hundred?” Finally, there is the joke of the title. The characters are not encased in an ancient rind, but in a modern rind. The modern rind  looks to be of the same species as the ancient rind, but it isn't the prelapsarian rind, the rind before the forbidden fruit and its rind. That is why there is no real patriarchal narrative here, but rather the slow wisdom  of forgetting. It is an interesting story, one with clear ties to Lafferty’s preferred cosmology (think what you will of it), his ideas about historical forgetting, his sense that human suffering may be preferable to human stagnation, and his faith in the felix culpa . In that sense, it stands as a counterimage to the hedonistic, disordered love of the sky found in "Sky."