But the synthetic Trislan was not a remembering metal. What did it have to remember? It had just been born. It was not a talking stone. It was not the Philosopher’s Stone, nor the Alchemist’s Stone, nor the Touchstone by which all things could be tested, not the King’s Stone that would cure almost all diseases and deficiencies. It hadn't the knack of inculcating sanity, piety, rectitude, good humor, and happiness. And the owners of the small totalities from the fractured stone didn't understand that some of these things are important to some of the people. So they didn't attempt to synthesize these extracurricular qualities of the stones. So it was that the world did pass into the Trislan Age, but it did not yet pass into the Second Age of Benevolent Magic.” My first reading of “Heart of Stone, Dear” missed its intricacy. As one who loves The Arabian Nights  and considers Sindbad: The 13th Voyage  (1989) to be a great and demanding Lafferty book, I somehow switched off my mind and let this story carry me along. On rereading it, I see the ending’s sentiment masks a few things. If the story’s overall significance did not land, the image of an esurient roc mutilating cows in the gore-covered Donnor's big pasture did. So did having the great bird of the Nights barf the O'Toole diamond for a bossy, ice queen girlfriend and thereby put the kibosh on mankind’s hope for a Second Age of Benevolent Magic. It would all make a brilliant short graphic novel or, better, an animated film, one in the spirit of The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad  (1949), with one half drawn from Lafferty’s pastiche and the other from something like Philip K. Dick’s “The King of the Elves.” Kids would remember it. First, there is the wonder of Trislan, the remembering stone, which would heal Flatland’s endemic amnesia. Lafferty’s language is in flight, describing it. What the people settle for is depressingly of our moment: Moore’s law and faster, trendier, better electronics. In other words, the wrong kind of memory. Then we have the memorable contrast between huge Selim Mahmud, the chemist, and slim Alfred Fleck, eleven-year-old rock-whisperer. It is Fleck, not Selim, who ultimately fails. They are probably now my favorite pair of characters in Lafferty, in part because Lafferty loads them with small, memorable details that shape the parallel. One of the best parallel contrasts is how each approaches theft. Something of their relationship shows up later in the relationship between the real Sindbad and John Scarlotti, the imaginative but simple kid from Chicago. Scarlotti loves seashells, and Alfred loves rocks. Both are savants, both slightly out-of-focus, each I suspect more intentionally and artistically underdrawn than most of Lafferty’s young characters, those fast-mouthed kids who have distinctive voice, Lafferty’s typical way of making a young person memorable being firecracker dialogue—though sixteen year old John is five years older than Alfred. Each boy is a self-betraying idealist. Each is besotted and tied to a Girl he wins, though Scarlotti’s Blue Moon turns out to be a mechanical doll. Finally, there is such remarkable compression here. Lafferty dazzles with how much information he conveys and how lightly he does it, and this story exemplifies that. I think of him using over 800 sources to write The Fall of Rome . This is the World Fantasy Master doing his effortless thing. In short, it is a magical little piece of writing that will always be overlooked. Lafferty opens with a fictional encyclopedia entry describing Trislan, a bogus or hoax metal with alchemical properties. It is said to have a specific gravity of 822 and the power to make a penny whistle sound like an entire orchestra. We then meet Selim Mahmud, a “well-rounded (at three hundred and fifty pounds) young American man” of many talents. Selim is both a theoretical chemist and a professional wrestler, and he has reasoned out that Trislan is not a hoax at all. It is, in fact, the sacred Black Stone of the Kaaba. Believing it to be a remembering stone, he travels to Mecca with twenty thousand dollars and a plan: to steal a small piece. To that end, he begins training, which sets up some of the comedy to follow. With the help of a flint-hearted confidence man who casts a spell on the guards—who might just be pretending to be asleep—Selim pulls off the heist. This is one of my favorite moments in a Lafferty story: Selim grabs the stone and walks out. The guards, for their part, perform a ritual. They take “a single egg out of the bird’s nest that was there,” inscribe a Kabbalistic mark on it, and place it inside a hidden hollow in the larger stone. Selim makes a madcap escape—from dromedary to car to plane—and returns to the United States with his prize. And, behold, it has all the magical properties of Trislan. He then fractures the stone into 243 smaller but complete manifestations. He has a reason for doing this. The story then introduces Alfred Fleck, “a thin little boy with red hair and almost colorless gray eyes who collected rocks and stones.” Alfred has a gift: the special stones call to him, telling him to come and find them. He likes to trade stones by sneaking into the City Museum at night, where Selim, the curator, happens to be. Alfred has two motivations. First, he simply loves rocks. He’s a lithomaniac. But he is also driven by his girlfriend, the eleven-year-old Catherine, so imperious she is known as the Empress Catherine. One of her traits is that she has a heart of stone—and with it, a lust for diamonds. Selim and Alfred have an origin story. It goes back to a night at the museum when Selim catches Alfred in the act. He tells him, “I can eviscerate you and stuff you and trade you off for a stuffed monkey”—but he lets him go. When Selim asks about the catch, Alfred replies, “The catch is that you can’t catch me again.” The two become friends, and Alfred, being a rock whisperer, becomes aware of the Black Stone and of Selim’s theft. The stone calls to him and tells him everything. Now return to the egg placed inside the Black Stone of the Kaaba. It was a roc’s egg. The magical roc that hatches from it is set to recover 239 fragments—an alchemical number—but no more. That’s the key to Selim’s plan. He distributes 239 of the stone’s manifestations to scientists and other interested parties, but keeps four for himself. The new owners succeed in synthesizing Trislan's physical substance, ushering in a new technological age. But they ignore its magical properties. This becomes the story’s cultural counterpart to the final turn: a betrayal of the deeper potential of the stone. Meanwhile, the egg in Mecca hatches a giant bird. It eats three hundred sheep and nineteen camels to build its strength before flying to America. So large it seems like an optical illusion, the roc hunts down the scattered manifestations, swallowing them one by one. Along the way, it also swallows the Great O'Toole Diamond. In parallel, Alfred trades a large crystal-ball stone for one of the manifestations of the Black Stone at the museum. Then disaster. The giant bird finds and eats Selim’s remaining three pieces, eating his arm as well. Selim phones Alfred. He warns him to protect the last remaining piece. He begs him. Think of the Second Age of Benevolent Magic.   But it is not to be. The stoney-hearted Empress Catherine demands Alfred get her the diamond now. She says, “I must have the Great O’Toole Diamond!” and she tells Alfred to trade the last manifestation of the Black stone to get the diamond.  Alfred finds the bird in a pasture "soggy with the blood and offal of cattle" and makes a trade: “The last manifestation of the stone, the very last of them, for the O’Toole Diamond.” The roc accepts. It throws up the O’Toole diamond and swallows the final manifestation of trislan. Alfred leaves with the diamond. His heart is cold as ice. He has blown the whole Second Age of Benevolent Magic. Lafferty writes that the last stone Alfred collected was the heart of stone of the eleven-year-old Empress Catherine. I want to close with two aspects of the story. I point them out for two reasons. First, Lafferty uses Kabbalah both decoratively and structurally. He uses it decoratively here, as he does in other places, such as in the story “ Configuration of the North Shore. ” He also uses it structurally, as he does in “ In the Turpentine Trees .” His use of Kabbalah in this story is closer to his usual technique. The second point. Because “Heart of Stone, Dear” is one of Lafferty’s Arabian Nights -style stories, one might assume that the Second Age of Benevolent Magic is simply a return to the magical world of the Arabian Nights . Surely that would be the First Age of Magic? The ambient of Richard Burton. But any reader of Sindbad could tell you there is nothing benevolent about Arabian Nights magic. Sindbad is darker than Not to Mention Camels (1976), though no one seems to agree with me on that. So what, then, was the First Benevolent Age of Magic? Lafferty ties it to the Black Stone of the Kaaba. There we will find the answer. A well-known story in Islamic tradition says that the Black Stone was given to Adam by God or by the Angel Gabriel when Adam was cast down to earth after the Fall. One finds this in early exegetical and historical sources such as al-Azraqī’s Akhbār Makkah  (9th century) and al-Ṭabarī’s Tārīkh al-Rusul wa-l-Mulūk . Adam is guided to the site of the first sanctuary on Earth, where he built a primitive Kaaba. The Black Stone is a celestial token, a cornerstone from Paradise. Later, when the Kaaba was lost in the Flood, the stone was preserved on the sacred mount Abū Qubays until Abraham and his son Ishmael rebuilt the Kaaba. At that time, Gabriel returned the stone to them for installation in its current position. In Islam, the story of Adam’s descent from Paradise to earth appears in the Qur’an. Satan deceives Adam and his wife into eating from the forbidden tree, and God then commands them to descend to earth. This contrasts with the Catholic doctrine of original sin, for the Qur’an does not portray Adam’s descent as a fall into sin or a loss of divine grace transmitted to humanity. It is a change of realm, from the Garden to the earthly world, where human beings are to live, labor, and be tested. In Islam, this descent is disciplinary and purposeful. Adam repents, God forgives him ( Qur’an 2:37), and he is sent to earth as the first prophet. He is not a fallen man in the sense later articulated by the doctors of the Catholic Church, the sense of man that Lafferty obsessively returns to. In Islamic cosmology, Adam’s descent stakes the beginning of human history and prophetic guidance: a transition, not a tragic corruption of human nature or loss of preternatural graces. Lafferty (I think) has this on his mind. The First Benevolent Age of Magic is Paradise itself, Eden. This connects with his recurring theme of postlapsarian amnesia. The Black Stone, as a remembering stone, loses its remembering quality when it is synthesized, becoming a Claude Shannon-like technological innovation. By linking this to the story’s motif of forgetting, Lafferty deepens his ongoing exploration of memory, loss, and spiritual continuity in modernity. This is Lafferty saying, once again, that the Fall is both a moral and mnemonic problem.

The world's a blast (Ka-whoosh! Ka-whish!) With healthy soul and belly, And all the skies are full of fish, And all the fish are smelly. Charles Fort’s Super-Sargasso Sea comes up on the blog from time to time. Judging by the number of variations Lafferty gave the idea, he loved it. Oceans, seas, rivers, springs, and other waterways are a major part of his corpus. He uses them to write about time, the unconscious, and the suprahistorical. Yet there are the twists. For instance, the unconscious in Lafferty is not merely psychological, for several reasons. First, as we know, he likes to exteriorize it. He makes it the container rather than the thing contained. Second, the unconscious points to what is below the limen, so it mingles with the forgotten, the recessed, and the real but less accessible, yet also that which is not primarily a function of repression. Rather, it closely parallels Lafferty’s thinking about amnesia. In his work, amnesia appears at multiple scales, from the ontological amnesia that follows the Primordial Fall to the historical amnesia that arises as fallen people create, lose, and forget their contingent worlds . The Oceanic unconscious likewise washes across scales. With this in mind, there are a handful of architectonic counterfigurations in Lafferty’s work. One is what he does with the waters below the limen. Because he envisions a vertical universe, he takes what is below and sets it on high, so that the primordial waters of the unconscious take on the properties of the waters above the firmament in Genesis 1:6–8. That brings us back to the Super-Sargasso. “And the Skies Are Full of Fish” ends with a reminder of the unconscious’s verticality, which most writers imagine as depth, as something below rather than above. What does Lafferty do? He does this: “The pool's only a mile from here, Austro?” Barnaby Sheen asked. “Which way?” “Up.” With verticality in mind, no surprise, then, that the Super-Sargasso was such a powerful image for Lafferty who often mythologizes around the axis mundi . Fort's Super-Sargaso is a region somewhere above the earth’s surface where gravitation is inoperative, or greatly weakened, a zone of suspension. Fort called it a “neutral zone” around the earth, like a magnet’s neutral zone, where objects lifted from the earth’s surface, or arriving from other planets, can be held indefinitely until storms or other disturbances shake them down. It is a kind of warehouse for all things misplaced, lost, or forgotten: derelicts, rubbish, old cargoes from interplanetary wrecks, things cast out from Mars and Jupiter and Neptune, things lifted by earthly cyclones—horses, barns, elephants, flies, dodos, moas, pterodactyls, leaves ancient and modern—all tending to disintegrate into homogeneous muds or dusts, red, black, yellow. That is all Fort, but it sure sounds like Lafferty. Fort’s The Book of the Damned  also describes both frigid and tropical regions, freshwater ponds and saltwater oceans, and floating islands sometimes stationary over parts of the earth. If you really dig into the topic, you find that Fort proposes the Super-Sargasso Sea as an oblique belt over Great Britain, France, and Italy, extending to India, with one strange addition. Fort wrote, “I think, now, that the Super-Sargasso Sea is an oblique belt, with changing ramifications, over Great Britain, France, Italy, and on to India. Relatively to the United States, I am not very clear, but think especially of the Southern States.” Look up, Tulsans! It is obviously fascinating for Lafferty and relevant to his many sky-fallen objects. Can there be any doubt that Lafferty noticed this in Fort? Fort was also confident that the Super-Sargasso had climates analogous to terrestrial geography: arctic ice fields, tropical zones where things putrefy, and temperate regions. One thinks of the many sky places in Lafferty, from major stories like “Not Limestone Islands” to minor ones like “Flaming Arrow.” Fort’s argument for the Super-Sargasso was his first major attempt to hammer out a unified theory of damned facts. It rested, fundamentally, on challenging Newtonian gravitation as a fixed quantity. He wrote that gravitation must be variable and rhythmic, Herbert Spencer being his source for this, that there is thus a neutral zone, and that the Super-Sargasso Sea lies within it. What he said he wanted was a “Science of Super-Geography” and a “guidebook to the Super-Sargasso Sea, for aviators.” The Fortean stories Lafferty wrote are something like this, though he uses the notion to introduce his major ideas about time, history, and perception. The Super-Sargasso became part of the The Men Who Knew Everything  sequence when Lafferty wrote “And All the Skies Are Full of Fish,” a Fortean title if Lafferty ever wrote one. In the sequence, the story follows “What Big Tears the Dinosaur’s,” where readers meet Austro’s pet dog. Both stories were written in 1974. Both draw on Watkin. In Watkin’s color theory as used by Lafferty, this story’s band is yellow, or art. It criticizes art that has pulled away from bodied life and become too artificial, in the pejorative sense. This appears in the contrast between two groups of children. There are the aesthetic willow dancers, who draw down a “pure,” clear rain from the sky, rain without fish. Then there is Austro and his club, drawing down rampant, fishy, crinoid-filled, ferry stuff. It is smelly, but it is also bodied, and without it, one cannot have a fish fry, one of Lafferty’s Catholic jokes in the story. Austro is still twelve. He joins a gang renamed the Local Anaesthetics and, because another boy has shown himself to be a coward, gets his massive dinosaur dog admitted as a member. Their club opposes the aesthetic children, whose willow dances demonstrate psychokinetic control over the weather. During one display of these powers, Amelia Corngrinder creates a localized rain shower in a birdbath. Then, suddenly, a sarcodic mass falls from the sky and shatters the stone. Lafferty’s memorable Susie Kalisky is there, presumably the one who drew down the meaty chunk: “It just seems that something is lacking,” Susie said. “There is something wrong with empty water, and there is something lonesome about uninhabited rain. Nobody lives in your rain, Amelia.” The story then moves to its climax. A public weather-making demonstration is to be held at the Civic Center, attended by city magistrates and the four Men Who Know Everything and Laff. They talk about the relationship between human thought and environmental conditions. The aesthetic children then perform a synchronized willow dance that summons seven sparkling showers, while the Local Anaesthetics struggle to keep pace with their countermeasures. Austro’s dog hides in the plaza by camouflaging as a thirty-foot hairy hill. Despite the efforts of the Local Anaesthetics, the aesthetic children keep a lead in the competition with their production of pure rain. Susie Kalisky steps in to settle this. She approaches the aesthetic children and says, "Your glasses are cracked, kids." Lafferty writes, And the glasses of all seven of them were cracked (all aesthetic, willow-dancing children wear glasses). And something else about them cracked at the same time. It was their protective psychic carapaces. It was their science itself. Throughout the story, she keeps cracking people’s glasses this way. It causes the children's eyewear (we are told they all wear glasses) and their psychic carapaces to shatter, ending their rain. More importantly, it brings down a massive fall of ancient fish, crinoid stems, and giant ferns. The townspeople transport the fallen material in twelve-ton trucks to Sheen’s Ravine for a banquet attended by five thousand people. Barnaby Sheen welcomes this plane of reality while eating the garnished fish, as Susie showers him with a shower of frogs and eels. We have, again, Lafferty’s use of noetic darkening centered on eyeglasses that do not make reality more visible but block access to it. We also have Lafferty's love of cracks and tears in consensus reality. The cracks Susie puts into the glasses are cracks into otherspace, cracks like the cracks in “The Man Who Walked Through Cracks.” They let reality in like a fast-fill valve and are a cousin of the rumbling of the past in “And Read the Flesh Between the Lines.” To make it work, Lafferty uses his signature technique of counterfiguration . On one side are the “pure-hearted and aesthetic children,” with their willow dances and their controlled, beautiful rain. On the other are the unlovely-looking Local Anaesthetics, with their raucous, smelly, inhabited rain, full of ancient fish and ferns. It might look like a quaint rivalry between kid clubs, but it is a comic war over aesthetics and over what is real; over what counts as beautiful and what art should be; whether “pure” beauty, the limpid and controlled shower, is superior to a wilder, more embodied, more pungent kind of beauty, the beauty of fish fries, garnished crinoids, and inhabited rain. I’ll end by saying a little about how Lafferty takes Fort’s idea and sacramentalizes it through Watkin. Watkin’s The Bow in the Clouds  treats Art as one of the stages in the ascent of aesthetic experience toward God. If you haven't read it, The Bow in the Clouds  (1932) is best summed up through its subtitle: "An Essay towards the Integration of Experience." Watkin tries to synthesize the domains of human knowledge and experience—Matter (Ultra-Violet), the Positive Sciences (Violet), Technology/the Ethical and Social Sciences/History (Indigo), Metaphysics (Blue), Life (Green), Art (Yellow), Sex (Orange), Religion (Red), and Mysticism (Ultra-Red)—into a unified vision grounded in Catholic metaphysics. It argues that all levels of reality find their coherence and ultimate meaning in the divine. On the whole, it is a characteristic example of early-twentieth-century English Catholic intellectual life, in the tradition of figures like von Hügel and Christopher Dawson. Watkin himself was not a Thomist. He was a Bonaventurist. St. Bonaventure is the scholastic thinker who most strongly emphasizes God as beauty. His work celebrates beauty as a transcendental . Lafferty repurposes Watkin’s ideas about the nature of beauty and aesthetic perception in a characteristic way, arguing with Watkin. That is what makes The Men Who Knew Everything  so much more interesting than being a set of color-coded exercises, and why Lafferty's Yellow pieces on Art is about the joyfully smelly and raucous. He sides with the rowdy, festive, incarnational version of beauty over the ethereal, disembodied, rarefied simplification of beauty. He refuses to Platonize. The aesthetic children do that and end up with empty water. In the imagination of the Church, that is the stagnant water one finds in scripture, not living water. Hence, we have Susie Kalisky's complaint that “there is something lonesome about uninhabited rain. Nobody lives in your rain.” When Lafferty writes that the scales fell from people’s eyes, we know he is quietly writing an apocalypse: The tide of battle swung to the Local Anaesthetics. Something else was falling to the pavements of the area now. It was the scales from the eyes of the people. Now the folks were able to see the monstrous crashing ichthyoids that had been, or would be, or maybe already were fish. Ancient sorceries will whip modern fetishes every time, and it was a case of that. Lafferty couldn't be counterfiguring harder. He switches the poles of the aesthetic and the anesthetic, a theme that also appears in one of his masterpieces, "The World as Will and Wallpaper," which he wrote not terribly long before "And All the Skies Are Full of Fish." “And All the Skies Are Full of Fish” is not much discussed or much read, but it is great stuff. A personal favorite.

“Mad Man” could stand as an emblem of Lafferty’s work in the minds of many readers, even if it is not the story they first think of when they think of him. It is classic, quirky, light-seeming 1960s science fantasy, full of Lafferty’s humor and style. Read by itself, it is really fun. Read against the whole of his work, however, it becomes a fascinating story, especially for anyone interested in Lafferty’s developing thoughts about the relation between machines and human persons, through his known and unknown landmark stories on the theme, such as "Last Laugh" and "This Grand Carcass Yet" to Past Master and beyond. One can see him working out his ideas about what he called the Programmed, and he even gives us a useful piece of nomenclature for them as a group: homo conventus . As the name implies, he is extending the genus homo , which in Lafferty includes figures like Finnegan, if he is in fact a homo neanderthalensis , to machines. The “oil of dog” in the story, which imparts the human spark to the Programmed, anticipates what Epiktistes is when Lafferty thinks through Epikt's birth in Arrive at Easterwine . Like the main character’s daughter in “Mad Man,” Epikt is a kind of transhumanist artificial intelligence. The following shows Epikt's creation, where Lafferty really goes wild with the concept of homo conventus . He will keep thinking about it, creating late characters such as Inneall in  Serpent's Egg  and writing that book's chapter-long meditation on artificial intelligence. With this backdrop in mind, there is also something oddly perverse about “Mad Man,” and how it imagines the relation of homo sapiens and homo conventus. After the summary, that is what I will focus on. Lafferty imagines the Cortin Institute, where scientists harvest a complex biochemical substance known as "Oil of Dog" or "paranexus" from human beings. They inject it into advanced robots called Programmed Persons. Oil of the dog gives the robots a human-like spark of creativity and intuition, but there is a rub. It is most potent when extracted from "Very Angry Men." This is where the main character comes in. He is George Gnevni, the Institute’s top producer of oil of dog. He is a very angry man indeed. To enkindle his constant fury, the Institute has him live in grinding poverty, feeds him meals that cause gastric pain, and assigns him daily mechanical assembly tasks using deliberately defective parts and sabotaged tools. Gnevni’s experience with these defective items is an example of Lafferty writing like a virtuoso, showing his genius as a parts man: Joker tools were sometimes substituted on him for the true tools—screwdrivers with shafts as flexible as spaghetti, key-drifts with noses as soft as wax, box-end wrench sets that were sized to fit nothing, soldering guns that froze ice on their tips, mismarked calipers with automatic slippage, false templates, unworkable crimpers, continuity testers that shocked a man to near madness. Lafferty gives us two days in the life of Gnevni. On the first day, we see his rage abate. On the second day, we see it radically diminished. On the second day, he arrives at work and is placid. Outside the facility, he doesn’t do what he usually does: let himself become enraged by the Institute's standard provocations so the Cortin people can milk him. He gently pets a mechanical puppy designed to be kicked. He politely greets an actress hired to play a crippled old lady whose crutches he is supposed to knock away. Inside the Institute, his pleasant mood and newfound efficiency at his mechanical tasks (he completes them all in one hour) cause panic among the medical staff. Under-doctor Cotrel, Over-doctor Ratracer, and Director Duggle subject Gnevni to a truly dehumanizing physical and psychological routine meant to make him blow his stack, but Gnevni takes it all with no complaining. The narrative underscores the sheer absurdity of his calm endurance against the Institute's worst torments: They put him through the routine. It was brutal. It would have made a roaring devil out of the sweetest saint. Even spectators commonly became white with fury when such a thing was put on, and there was no limit to the effect on the victim. Gnevni endured it with composed sorrow but without anger. And when even the routine didn't work what more could you do to him? As a final resort, the doctors bring in Peredacha. She is a female Programmed Person who recently received Gnevni's biochemical additive, the oil of dog. They hope a pitiful shtick about being his daughter, done in the style of the little match girl, will lead to a truly violent outburst. Instead, Gnevni expresses affection for her, and later, he suggests they run away together, noting that she shares his cortin and adrenaline. All this deeply frustrates Under-doctor Cotrel, who completely loses his temper and screams and violently beats Gnevni. Observing the fury, Director Duggle dismisses Gnevni and assigns Cotrel to be the Institute's new Very Angry Man. The oil of the dog in “Mad Man” is the precursor of the person précis necessary for the birth of Epiktistes, and the Programmed Persons seek it out. Because there is only one donor, things become a little odd. From the time I first read the story, I have been puzzled by the way it combines the metaphors of wiving and siring in the Gnevn-Peredacha relationship. She is imagined as somehow both a daughter and a lover, something related, perhaps, to Lafferty’s fascination with the parthen . When Gnevni tells Peredacha that she is "cortin of my cortin and adrenalin of my adrenalin," he is giving a variation of Adam's declaration about Eve in Genesis 2:23: "This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh." By using this biblical formula, a few things are going on. First, Gnevni draws a parallel to the creation account of Genesis. Just as Eve was formed from Adam's body, Peredacha’s human-like spark and creativity were synthesized from Gnevni’s extracted biochemicals. In his mind, he is her Adam, the biological source of her awakening. But the next part is where we enter complicated Lafferty territory. By drawing on Adam to figure a machine he calls his "daughter," one wonders what has happened. Has Gnevni been subjected to so much torture, isolation, and denial of "wifing privileges" that he has become warped? It looks as if he has been so starved for love and companionship that his psychological wires cross. Paternal creation and romantic partnership get confused. When he tells her that they "might go off somewhere," it becomes a pseudo-incestuous, romantic proposition so awkward and inappropriate that it actually forces a physical reaction from the robot, directly triggering Cotrel's breakdown: “I know, but I'm unable to do it. I have been thinking, Peredacha, that since you are my daughter in a way — cortin of my cortin and adrenalin of my adrenalin — perhaps the two of us might go off somewhere and —”“Holy howling hog!” Under-doctor Cotrel took off in a screech too high for the human ear to follow, so perhaps only Peredacha heard and flushed. Understanding that strange flush is for me the center of the story. The image Lafferty gives us is of a flushing little match girl who dies because her parents are so callous. In a way, Gnevni becomes the figure usually associated with the mother in the Lafferty parthen set. An aside: why oil of dog? My guess is that a Very Angry Man is, in effect, an angry son of a bitch. Lafferty uses the verbal formula “son of a” at one point in the story. He uses the phrase "son of a she shink." Why "she" unless this is euphemism? That is where I draw the inference. I’ll wrap up with something about “The Little Match Girl.” She is the title character of Hans Christian Andersen’s famous 1845 fairy tale. In that story, she is an impoverished, barefoot child, forced to sell matches on the freezing streets on New Year’s Eve and too terrified of her abusive father to return home empty-handed. So she huddles in an alley, lighting her matches one by one to keep warm. As she strikes them, she sees beautiful and consoling visions in the flames, including her loving, dead grandmother, before freezing to death in the night. Lafferty has fun setting this up as tear-jerking material, but he subverts the tragedy by redefining the nature of the “spark.” In Andersen’s story, the spark of the match is ambiguous. It is an illusion of life and warmth before death. In “Mad Man,” the added spark that Peredacha receives is somehow the biochemical essence of humanity, Gnevni’s cortin and adrenaline, which awakens her robotic mind and raises her to genius. It is a cousin to what Epikt receives from some of the world's finest minds. When Peredacha mimics the Match Girl to enrage Gnevni, Lafferty twists the trope. She recognizes his own spark within herself when Gnevni refuses to play the cruel father, the sort of father Andersen’s little match girl had. Yet the scene is also coded in the language of sacramental marriage, where the match girl runs away with the father. What does one do with that?

Being without clothes, he was embarrassed of the girl sitting there on the box. "I am sorry, Temo. I will get on my pants as soon as I find out whether these things are pants, and if they have the proper holes in them. I am sorry, Temo, that you should see me like this." Then he smiled, for he knew something else like a fundamental thing. The girl was dead and could not see him at all . . . Be sober-minded, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour. 1 Peter 5:8 “Other Kind of Animal” is a short story Lafferty wrote for A. L. Fierst, sent to him, and then abandoned. Finished in September 1960 and still unpublished, it is set in the red-light barrio of a Mexican border town, where an amnesiac American wakes beside a dead girl, pieces together his name and circumstances, and kills the man who murdered her. It contains several elements that are not at all rare in Lafferty’s pre-nucleation fiction: Spanish flavor, prostitutes, animal imagery, a tavern, and crisp dialogue that borders becomes unnaturalistic. The plot is pure pulp formula—amnesia, pursuit, showdown—and it resolves as the formula demands. But Lafferty does not leave it there, even in such a formulaic story. He brings in his Catholic theology. There is a barmaid who knows what a person is like after Purgatory (or says she does), a dead girl whose kindness extends beyond the boundary of death, and a man improvising mercy for a prostitute with no authority behind it except love. Andrew Ferguson’s blog post on “Other Kind of Animal” is worth reading for the background it provides on Fierst, Lafferty’s correspondence-course agent. It is essential information. I also I think he is right that the story’s unusually formulaic shape reflects Fierst’s pulp-writing method, and right too that it constrains Lafferty. He calls the title conceit—a painting of a "other animal" that is not a lion—“the one bit of extravagance.” I think this misses how reclassification governs the whole story and provides the underlying structure in which the amnesia, pursuit, and showdown unfold. We move from name (“Temo”) that becomes word ("I fear"), from cop to pimp, from toy gun into deadly weapon, from dead girl to one who is somehow a protector, and so on. What is good about the story is this concatenated pattern of Joe Savage's correction, in which something taken for one thing is revealed to be another. As Joe pieces his reality together in the dunes, he links the painting to his own fatal misreadings: The lion is not a lion, he is another kind of animal. The big man is not a cop; he is another kind of animal. No un soplón. Un alcahuete.  Why had I thought him a cop? Half of the toughs in the barrio carry pistols. He was the one that Little Rosita was afraid of when she said 'Temo.' Then there is the theology that Lafferty cannot help but bring in. This is not Ferguson’s interest, so it is unfair to point out that he does not address it, yet it is a major part of what makes the story a Lafferty story, with Lizeta's coded eschatology, Rosita's communion past death, and Joe's improvised mercy. Returning to the shack to face the man hunting him, Joe gives a weirdly beautiful, makeshift absolution over the murdered girl, where he restores her name: "It hasn’t worked out, Little Rosita. You were afraid of dying, and I am a little afraid of it too. Maybe it will be better for you; they will know how kind you were always, and I understand they have a special department for barrio girls. But if I ever did any good, I did it too late to matter. I will wait here for your lion, who, I understand, is an other kind of animal." And then there is what I take to be one of the big questions the story raises. How can one not wonder what kind of animal is painted above the bar if it is not a lion? My theory is a jaguar. Joe Savage, the gringo, looks at it and sees a badly drawn lion—but the girl keeps correcting him: "It's some other kind of animal." Jaguar comes from the Tupí-Guaraní yaguar , "he who kills with one leap," and Joe's complaint about the painting is that the animal "looks as though he will end up his leap sitting down, and that will hurt." This is a defective jaguar. First, we see Joe Savage doing what he does in this story: asserting something and being corrected. He reads the lion image through his Anglo perspective and gets a bunch of things wrong: first, the type of animal; second, the significance of the leap; and third, the usual outcome. A jaguar in mid-pounce, stocky and compact, would look nothing like the long-bodied leaping silhouette of an African lion. To Joe, who doesn't know what he's looking at, it is a botched job. That makes the painting a piece iconographic insetting in the larger narrative, and Joe can't decode it, just as he can't decode "Temo" as a word rather than a name, or the big man as a pimp rather than a cop. The painting is the story’s primary icon that expands into story pattern. The jaguar is the lord of the underworld in Mesoamerican tradition, the creature that moves between the worlds of the living and the dead, day and night. In the story, the jaguar is something like the pimp, an infernal lord who holds the barrio's women captive and kills anyone who tries to take them out. And the painting's mostly incorrect interpretation by Joe comes true: the animal that kills with one leap does land sitting down, and it does hurt. The physical toll of the delayed death mirrors the botched leap of the painting: For something had happened. The big man no longer had the same strength. He was not beating Joe to death, he was hardly beating him. . . . The big man stood still and rocked on his feet. His face broke open in a dark grimace and he wobbled badly. Then he went down. "I would laugh if it were not so painful,” [Joe murmured]. "I killed him with a toy gun after all." So Joe gets the animal wrong, but his interaction with the iconographic insetting of the leaping jaguar foreshadows the resolution of the shootout. The big man dies on his feet, wobbling, then going down. Finally, perhaps something on the guns in the story. Ferguson reads the pimp's oversized pistol as phallic. He calls it "comically oversized, ludicrously phallic," and I suppose one could do that: look at the big gun, which is supposed to be a big dick. So the “cop” with the big gun becomes the pimp with the big dick, peacocking with the gun as compensation or not. Anyone who wants to end here is welcome to do so. But I think the story's metaphors point elsewhere. Joe Savage's running critique of the barrio treats everything around him as bad art: the lion in the painting is badly drawn, the big man/pimp looks like "a bandit out of the funny papers," the barmaid and her neighbors are "hams." The gun is part of this aesthetic deficiency. The phallic gun is present because this is a story about prostitution and a pimp. Ferguson usually jumps at the first chance to go metafictional, so I don't quite know why he doesn't do that here. Consider what Lafferty writes about the gun. It is "larger than life, like something carried by a circus clown.” Joe Savage’s objection is that "a caricature can be too broad." I read that as saying the pimp’s gun is like an artistic distortion, a bit like the Fierst exercise Lafferty is doing. The resolution of the story confirms this: Joe kills the pimp with a small pistol so modest that the dying man mocks it as a toy. The "toy gun" then enters the transformative displacements that we looked at earlier. Phallus point taken, in other words, but look at the phallus a little less closely, and you see the larger pattern of characters circulating inside a set of predetermined genre constraints: Why had he even come to the barrio? Well, he had come out of curiosity. He had come because he had been told of it. He had come like many of the tourists to make a night of it, but he had stayed for three nights and was well into the third day. And he had met Little Rosita, and they had formed the Not-Like-The-Others Society. It goes a little like this: "What is a nice man like you seeking here? You are not like the others. How lucky it is that you have found me, the only one who could possibly understand you at all."And then it goes like this: "Why does a nice girl like you lead such a life? You were not meant to be a barrio girl. Let me take you away from here. No, it is not a joke. I will take you away. I have the means." The Not-Like-The-Others Society did well for many hours . . . All this is more sophisticated than it first appears. Even within the hackneyed confines of Fierst’s playbook, Lafferty’s characteristic devices are at work.

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

“As to the ‘Square Hills of Quintana Roo’ (dammit [. . .] you’ve got my typewriter upset again), I loved that title but I DON’T believe I ever actually wrote the piece. The square hills were the strange pyramids in Yucatan, believed by some archeologists to be older than the pyramids of Egypt.” — Letter, 1993 MAYA - YUCATAN setting novel. The HUITMANNA, bearded QUOTZO, still lives, and the civilization is still thriving under jungle shades. — Notes The Square Hills of Quintana Roo  is a fragment consisting of a single chapter, along with a body of working notes, marginalia, planning material, and a clipping. It is a typical Lafferty raw draft, full of caret insertions, strikethroughs, pasted-over notes, and variant passages, the residue of a story still being hammered into shape, though the first chapter itself is typed. From Lafferty’s notes, one learns that he intended the piece as the opening of a novel rather than a short story, and the file includes facts about the region. The surviving chapter begins in medias res  at Chetumal, in the Mexican state of Quintana Roo. An airman named Juan Petirrojo lands an overloaded plane and seeks out a man named Barnard Oregon, whom he had met briefly the previous week at Orlando Setopierras’s bar in Quiriguá, Guatemala. The airman is a wonderfully colorful character, given to the sort of outbursts one associates with Lafferty characters. At various points, he exclaims: “Oh, by the square hills of Quintana Roo!” “Oh, by the compass-rose of Gyroscopius himself!” “Oh, by the rank-water Fountain of Oganta!” The last will make a Lafferty a reader’s ears perk up. How does the airman Petirrojo know about the Organta of “Frog on the Mountain” and “In Outraged Stone” ? We never find out. But we do learn that Petirrojo carries what he calls “lively pieces” in his cargo, passengers or beings who have apparently already disembarked without being seen. Suddenly, the men find themselves running, pursued by something. Bernard Orlando doesn’t Jin’s why he running. We never learn what chases them, but they flee through the jungle to Godolphin’s Keep, an old morada  that has been leased, and barricade themselves inside. The pursuit is marked throughout by the uncanny materiality of stone: stone feet pounding hard on the jungle floor behind them, a stone fist blooding Petirrojo’s mouth, and what sounds like a stone rifle bullet striking the portal they enter in the keep wall. It didn’t sound like human feet on the broken-stone, humus-muffled, scratch-jungle floor. It hadn’t the resonance of flesh. It was the sound of stone feet pounding. The novel fragment breaks off just after the two men wedge-lock the door. The working notes show something of the larger architecture toward which Lafferty at the time was building. The Maya ruins are not ruins at all, but gateways. He says they lead to things “like prairie-dog towns,” to a subterranean civilization, so Square Hills of Quintana Roo  woukd have been his lost-civilization novel. What else might that have looked like? According to the notes, the stone carvings are not representations of human faces. They are nonhuman people who happen to appear as porous stone. The “artificially deformed heads” of Maya archaeology are not artificial at all. Lafferty writes, Artificially deformed heads bedamned. Those are not artificially deformed heads. They are their own undeformed heads. The whole hidden world is concealed by ground-based devices that deflect aircraft and by artificial storms deployed as cover. The character names are bilingual jokes that double as what would probably have been thematic keys: Petirrojo is Spanish for "robin" (John Robin), and Setopierras is seto piedras (stone fence). An interesting what-if, this South American adventure fiction with a high-concept speculative premise. It would have been fun.

But the lie had to be a good one, because if your lie is badly done it makes everyone feel wretched, liar and lied-to alike plunged into the deepest lackadaisy, and everyone just feels like going into the other room and drinking a glass of water, or whatever is available there, whereas if you can lie really well then get dynamite results, 35 percent report increased intellectual understanding, awareness, insight, 40 percent report more tolerance, acceptance of others, liking for self, 29 percent report they receive more personal and more confidential information from people and that others become more warm and supportive toward them--all in consequence of a finely orchestrated, carefully developed untruth. ― Donald Barthelme, Flying to America: 45 More Stories Lord Dunsany’s barefaced liar Jorkens is one of my favorite literary characters, and I have a soft spot for the club story. The genre is usually traced in its modern form to R. L. Stevenson’s “The Suicide Club,” though it has more than a little in common with the framed storytelling of the Decameron , the Canterbury Tales , and the Arabian Nights . Lafferty uses the genre in several places. The best known, without doubt, is the Improbable Club, also called the High Liars Club, in Space Chantey . That extraordinarily exclusive establishment stands more than a hundred stories up in the leaning, ramshackle buildings of Guimbarde Town on the planet Yellow Dog. Inside one finds a sanctuary for the universe’s greatest liars, with asylum granted to anyone who can tell a topper, the truly galloping and unparalleled lie. Anyone who tells the truth is punished. Throat-slit and trapdoor-dropped punished. The prototype of the Improbable Club in Lafferty is Club Mentiros, or the Liars’ Club. The compositional history of the odd place is a little complicated. The earliest version of it seems to have originated in 1958. Lafferty then, and this is conjectural, appears to have rewritten a version of it as a science-fiction story, in his usual way of adding SF flavor. As Andrew Ferguson has noted, the front cover MS page bears the note “FRAME USED IN ESTEBAN.” On the other side appears the line “Change to Space Ace Liars’ Club.” Read Esteban , however, and you learn that Lafferty does not use Club Mentiros as its frame. Instead, Lafferty uses Club Mentiros as a setting. What happened? It looks as though there were three phases: an original Spanish Club Mentiros from 1958, about which Ferguson has written in reference to the Space Ace SF genre-graft version; and then the 1963 Esteban  version of the club, which returns to the Spanish one, with it being planted in Mexico City. I’ll begin with the Space Ace Liars’ Club version of the club and then say a little about what Lafferty does with the location in Esteban . Ferguson has worked through how Lafferty gave the original version its SF chrome. Space Ace Club Mentiros is a secluded corner of a tavern called the Snake Bar on the asteroid Ilhota Dos Gatos. Lafferty quickly establishes the location's scale and management: The Club Mentiros was small, possibly the smallest really famous club in the universe. It wasn't a room; it was only the corner of a room. It had a broken table, and four chairs made out of split rails and old rope or czisco nets. It was near-deserted so much of the time that a great cobweb, the grandfather of all cobwebs, covered it like a shroud; the most frequent lodger of the Club was a spider as big as a house cat. He, incidentally, was president of the Club. The club officially has nine members, but there is a wrinkle. One member is always completely unknown to the rest. In addition to the giant spider, the furnishings include an unlocked armoire stocked with exotic liquors and a young sea serpent resting on a maze of wall pegs. One evening, three members—a pauper named Endive English, a fisherman named Sylvester Sachen, and a millionaire named Goldfuchs Gudge—gather to drink from an ancient jar of mountain dew and tell stories. Endive English recounts a trip to the mainland where, after briefly playing drums at a tavern, he is arrested and jailed. He claims he escaped by drinking a strange black liquor that gave him superhuman strength. Breaking the walls, he throws away his money and bottle, swims to a ship, and sails it onto rocks. Sylvester Sachen claims he caught the discarded bottle while fishing and fed its liquor to bait, which hooks a sixty-foot sea monster. After months of struggle, his small fish, driven by the liquor’s appetite, consumes the giant from the inside out. Goldfuchs Gudge wraps up the lie. He says he caught both English’s thrown money and Sachen’s discarded bottle while sitting on a hotel windowsill, where he was going to kill himself after losing his twelfth fortune. In a darkly comic nod to the "Suicide Club" trope, Gudge explains how his usual plea for sympathy backfired: I have a favorite trick which I use at such times. We were high in a hotel tower and I went to the window, threw one leg over the sill, and made a great fuss about jumping out. Always before this had caused consternation, and friendly hands had pulled me back from self-destruction. That night, however, they were all on to me. ‘Let the sevenletter so-and-so jump,’ said one of them. ‘Help the five-letter expletive on his way,’ said another. ‘Somebody give that four-letter a push,’ said a third. This made it almost a point of honor that I kill myself. There was no graceful way I could decline. Fortunately, just as he was bound by honor to jump, the flying bottle and money arrived. The last drops of the black liquor revitalized him, and Gudge used the funds to re-enter a high-stakes casino game where he won his thirteenth fortune. The narrative returns to present events inside the club, Gudge has something special, a fresh bottle of the dark liquor. He just happens to have recently purchased the distillery, so the men will never run out. The three keep drinking until sunrise, at which point the sea serpent on the wall—who seemed like a decoration—stretches and blinks its eye at the morning light. So ends the Space Ace version. In Esteban , Club Mentiros is one of the world's oldest establishments. It is the exclusive gathering place reserved for "high liars," or, as Lafferty calls them, "royal liars." It might seem to be located in the corner of a ship's chandler's warehouse in Mexico City, but it has a mystical, otherworldly character: And the Club was small, possibly the smallest really famous club in the world. It hadn’t a room of its own; it had only the corner of a room. But there was the sound of the fog lapping under it. The inside is a variation on the other versions: a broken table, chairs made of curious sticks and fish netting, and shipboard kegs for seats. Its custodian is, again, a cat-sized cob-spider that sits in a huge, shroud-like web. Again, the living sea-serpent is on the wall among a maze of fish-net pegs. The centerpiece of the club is just what a drinker might hope: The heart of the club was an old armario, a rickety wall cabinet full of bottles. Though many had hoped and pegged, the cabinet was never truly locked to the members. The cabinet contained licor verde in Venetian crystal, Palermian in goatskin suits, sugar-rum in little barriletes, genuine mountain dew in clay jars, and cactus-lightning in snake-skin bottles. When readers enter The Club Mentiros in Chapter 11, a session is in progress. And, again, a lying session needs at least three members to be present. Finally, membership in the club spans time and space. So those Space Ace versions? They belong to the same club in Esteban . It’s a wonderful example of Lafferty doing some metafictional bridgework by keeping the guest list completely unbound by the timeline: There were traveling men of all sorts in the Club that evening, some from the distant past, and some from the far future. But among the high spielers, Dorantes and Esteban were not mean members. Not surprisingly, the club is a stage for storytelling, a venue for crazy and competitive tall tales. Members share yarns. A young Limey claims to have sailed his ship onto a mountain peak in dense fog, and another man claims a scar on his body is a "gill" that allowed him to live underwater for seven years with the Queen of the Deep. Another member, an old Aztec, flips history on its head: Then the old Aztec told about the earliest overseas discovery. Not of America, by the Europeans, but of Europe by the Americans. It was an Aztec and it was five hundred years to the day before this present time. They had sailed up the River of Spain and found only pig-keepers and blackamores . . . The grandfather of the old Aztec himself had then married the Queen of France, and from these two are descended all Frenchmen to this very day. Instead of just being a set piece, the club plays an important role in the novel. After surviving the hellish nine-year journey across the continent, Esteban and Dorantes return to the club to reclaim their former status, as new liars have popped up in their absence and they are all but forgotten. Over the course of the night, tales are swapped, including towering stories about surviving in the wilderness by developing "extensible jaws" and eating a buck deer whole. It is good stuff. The two men successfully re-establish themselves: But by dawn our two friends were the Princes of the Place. They received an ovation from the members, and once more they were proclaimed to be the finest liars of the Indies. The sea-serpent in his nest of pegs on the wall glowed at them with real pleasure and rewarded them with his most comprehending wink. When you are in with the serpent, you are in. Finally, the club is a major turning point. Just as they leave the club at dawn, really proud of their storytelling triumph, and with so much history between them, the novel delivers a gut-punch: As they left the Liars’ Club at dawn, Dorantes casually told Esteban that he had sold him. This is a towering betrayal, as powerful as the deepest moments of Okla Hannali . It shatters the celebration and forces Esteban to return to the perilous North. That is where Esteban has its apocalyptic final act.

“Monitors were set up, and their capacity calculated. It was very wide, but not infinite. All credible impressions, projections, motifs, sensories, theories, and cogitations were catalogued. They were revised over a long period, added to as early randoms appeared, and put into final clarified form. Then the door was closed and nothing else could be added.” Lafferty wrote the unpublished dystopian short story “Vestige” in 1963, between two of his strong stories, “Pani Planet” and “Mad Man.” Of the unpublished stories, “Vestige” ranks near the bottom for me. What came later stole its thunder, though other readers may enjoy it far more than I do. It has a good deal of economy and some tight world-building. Hawkshaw, the robot detective and Stasi stand-in, is memorable, with his bloodhound eyes and a head that seems to end in a deerstalker cap. The story's significance lies in how it anticipates themes found elsewhere, in works such as  Past Master , with its world surveillance, Pandomation, and précis machines. Aside from some unusual incidental detail, it is not much like the science fiction Lafferty usually writes, because it is so reportorially and earnestly flat. Its premise, that original thought must be snuffed out into what Lafferty later calls post-consciousness, is handled primitively, as if he were doing a Hanon exercise. So here is the plot. Humanity is in some kind of post-apocalyptic situation, or maybe it is just that all urbanized areas have been merged into a single town. That is unclear. What is clear is that near-total centralization obtains, and with it, near-absolute order, administered through the monitoring of citizens' thoughts and behaviors. To extinguish unauthorized ideas, past generations surgically altered the population. The state's justification for mutilation is summarized in the Master Interrogator's public address: “The problem was solved almost completely by slurring the olfactory capsules of seven-day-old infants; the operation was soon broadened to affect the receptors of sight and taste . . . The operation was broadened again to cover the slurring of certain areas of the brain that were once called ‘creative.’ Almost all of our troubles were found to come from those areas.” Now no human has a sense of smell, and everyone is effectively colorblind. The ability to taste flavor has been reduced. Creative brain activity has been slowed through relentless thought control. Citizens must communicate using only ten thousand approved phrases, and everyone must "lip-think" to enable continuous instrumental detection. This last part reads like talking to oneself silently, and it is just about the only source of humor in the story. At least, it makes me laugh. It plays out as if one is catching up with one's own thoughts. Whenever an unapproved thought occurs, a World Alert is triggered. There begins a relentless tolling of booming bells that go bong , bong , bong . And that brings Hawkshaw, who patrols and interrogates citizens, while Master Interrogator Manlove Mobley gives public speeches that broadcast hope: maybe the current deviate will be the last deviate. Society will be perfect with the Final Extinction of the Randoms. This is perfection as completion; completion as annihilation; and, therefore, annihilation as perfection. A version of Ouden. The poor guy who becomes the Random this time is John Aislingiu. He slowly comes to understand that he caused the alarm and confesses it to his wife, Francine. He had a dream about the smell of an ocher-colored musical note dropped into a pool in a neo-Gothic woods by a large frog that wept. Francine knows thoughts like this are forbidden and monstrous, so she sounds the household klaxon to turn him in. John is arrested, shouting about his thoughts. Rather than recant, he shows himself to be almost too pure a stock character in a dystopian story: “But I will tell it!” John howled out in the fury for expression that people used to feel in generations past. “I am the only one ever to have this thought! Something is lost if I cannot bring it out! The world is too stuffy if I cannot think grotesquely beyond it. I'll tell it if it kills me!” He is then put in a soundproof quarantine chamber so that uncatalogued ideas won't contaminate the rest of the population. At dawn, he is brought before a guillotine, following speeches by Hawkshaw and the Interrogators. Now that John is dead, the bells go silent. The crowd disperses under the assumption that deviance has been eradicated from the world. Then, after only six beats of silence, the monitoring relays panic and the bells resume their chaotic tolling. The new alert is triggered, this time by a dull, three-year-old child who had previously shown no interest in his surroundings. It just played with a crooked stick all day. Yet now the child laughs as a new, unprecedented "almost-thought" flicks into his mind. Lafferty shows how tenuous the social control is in the story's final lines through this chuckle: Four—five—six beats of slow silence, and the terrifying bells would be forgot.The seventh beat of silence and— Pandemonium Hystericum Profanum ! A panic of monitors and a wild activity of relays! The discordant bells took up the cacophonous beat again in their harsh broken thunder... A dull child sits on the ground and chuckles. A random impression has flicked into his mind—an almost-thought that nobody else has ever thought before.And the world is in danger. That is "Vestige," another Lafferty story about the impossibility of any system so closed that the human potentials cannot help slipping its bounds. The authoritarian regime in it does all it can to crush and control every single human member, and Lafferty thinks that this is not possible. True to what we might expect, he associates this kind of political project not, as many of his readers will, with the ideologies of the right, but with those of the left. It is why the instrument of execution is that of the French Revolution, the guillotine. Lafferty sees the threat of scapegoating deviates—who are, of course, ordinary people with the capacity for free thought and the capacity to be rightly ordered—as coming from the Left. This means his deviates are not the X-Men or people who like Foucault. The villains, in typical Lafferty fashion, bear names of a leftist ideology: Goodworld, Solidarity, Manlove. They might as well be named Liberté, Égalité, and Fraternité. This would probably be easy to miss if one didn't know his work, that his target is radical forms of this-worldly communitarianism, not fascism, which he of course also hates . On the story's critique of the Left, there is also a Cathead/Cosmopolis factor at work: most people in "Vestige"'s post-conscious society do nothing, and this idleness has been a cultural disaster. Spiritual alienation in Lafferty is always worse than any Marxist form of economic alienation in the sphere of production. Only those with an "inner compulsion" to activity do the work of the world, and there are almost exactly enough of them to handle affairs; work is considered "unsettling to the non-worker types." The re-engineering of human perception of color and the abolition of smell satirize the Enlightenment impulse to measure everything, thereby rationalizing government through political arithmetic and the science of society. More broadly, Lafferty locates the problem in the attempt to regulate positive liberty, which he equates with the desire to change human nature from the ground up. Making people free through rationalized control is the mistake of the French Revolution, positivism, Marxism, and every form of technocratic progressivism. Here, the process is unnamed, but in Lafferty we know it by many names: the Astrobe Dream of Past Master , the Red Revolution of the Coscuin Chronicles , the Kangaroo of Serpent's Egg , and much besides. The problem is that "Vestige" itself is just not very interesting, especially in light of what was to come from Lafferty's imagination, even if he is arguing for that freedom by writing "Vestige." To me, Lafferty is always more interesting on the implications of, and the breakdown of, consensus than on the problem of political control.

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

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

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

Picking up on yesterday’s post and the theme of Gnosticism, I want to look at its presence in Lafferty’s work a little further. Lafferty often extracts elements of Gnostic thought and builds spectacularly upon them, shaping strange new conceptual structures all his own. Sometimes, this is as straightforward as in his short story "Snuffles" (1960), where being acts as a demiurge; other times, it is a complex interplay of Gnostic and Kabbalistic ideas, as in Not to Mention Camels (1974). Rarely does he present a direct, unified variation of Gnostic thought. One exception is "The All-At-Once Man." As with all of Lafferty’s writing, the story can be enjoyed without any knowledge of the ideas he plays with. But here, he leans in heavily, crafting a brilliant parody of Valentinian Gnosticism. Since Valentinian Gnosticism is a vast and dark rabbit hole, I’ll begin by sketching the plot, then unpack key elements to show how I think the story works. "The All-At-Once Man" belongs to Lafferty’s Men Who Knew Everything  cycle. One of these men is the charismatic John Penandrew, a former student of Monica Hall. His peers include George Drakos, Harry Donovan, Cris Benedetti, and Barnaby Sheen, along with Lafferty himself, appearing as "the man who doesn’t know everything." Penandrew’s goal is to possess his entire life at once, to exist simultaneously as a boy, youth, man, and old man, and evade natural death. He confidently tells his brilliant friends that he will achieve this. To do so, he gains power from the legendary Prester John. Though he attains a distorted form of everlasting life, his success is hollow. It backfires, creating a rift between him and his wife, Zoe Archikos, and spiritually warping him, making him, as Lafferty says, lopsided. The fragmented parts of himself, now living independently, return to him as degenerate “nephews.” His wife, Zoe, leaves but later returns. Together, they inhabit what is essentially a haunted house on Harrow Street, trapped in a grotesque union. "The All-At-Once Man" parodies Valentinianism by retelling its primary myth as an uncanny marriage story. The primordial man tries to restore himself to Pleroma, the divine fullness, by merging all his Aeons (his past and future selves) into a single, simultaneous existence. As he tells his friends: “I know pretty well what I want to do and I know pretty well what it consists of. I will become every aeon of myself simultaneously; then I will have become a complete man — and then I will not die. There is a meaning within a meaning of the old word aeon. Aeon means ages. But the pleroma or plentitude is made up of substantial powers called aeons. I maintain that these two meanings are the same. In Gnosticism, the aeon is one of the group of eternal beings that combine to form the supreme being — all of them are eternal and simultaneous, but no one of them would be eternal out of combination. I believe that there is an analogy on the human plane; and I intend to become that analogy, to be all my ages simultaneously and forever, to be every aeon of myself.” In effect, John is a distorted reflection of the Valentinian anthrôpos , the original spiritual man, sometimes identified with Geradamas, who falls into ignorance and fragmentation. Lafferty plays with this idea when the men who know everything recall their intellectual formation. For all his brilliance, John Penandrew remains ignorant of theological nuance. Benedetti points this out when he tells him: “You have common decency, John, but not integrity,” Cris said. “I use the word to mean unified totality and scope — that is integrity in the theological sense. I use the word as Tanquerey uses it. (They used to study Tanquerey's Dogmatic Theology  in the seminaries. Now they study rubbish.)” This is a deep cut from Lafferty, who draws on passages from Tanquerey, like this one from Manual of Dogmatic Theology , Vol. 1, which addresses praeternatural selfhood and theological risk in Augustinianism: On this issue of dangerous systems, with its emphasis on "every sound idea and intuition." Lafferty writes: “We had all gone to school together to the Augustinians at Monica Hall, and minds once formed by the Augustinians are Augustinian forever. We had learned to latch onto every sound idea and intuition and hold on. At least we had more scope than those who went to school to the Jesuits or the Dominicans. This information is all pertinent. Without the Augustinian formation John Penandrew would never have shattered—he'd have bent.” In Valentinian Gnosticism, the Pleroma is the transcendent, spiritual realm of the Aeons, divine emanations of God existing in perfect harmony. Before chasing his false Pleroma, John already possesses a rightly ordered harmony within his home. But unlike in Gnosticism, it is this ‘Pleroma’ that he stands to lose. At the story’s outset, Lafferty writes: “This is also an attempt to record some of the strange goings-on in the house on Harrow Street, and it is a halfhearted (no, a faint-hearted or downhearted) attempt to record the looser goings-on in the subsequently forever house on Harrow Street. The subject is a man who had everything, who took hold of everything beyond that, and who was broken to pieces by it. Or was not.” John is happily married to his Greek wife, Zoe Archikos. In Valentinianism, Sophia Achamoth (a fallen Aeon) disrupts cosmic harmony by attempting to grasp the unknowable Bythos (the deep, hidden God), thereby fragmenting and giving rise to the Demiurge. Lafferty plays with Aeonic concepts, blurring Sophia (Wisdom) and Zoe (Life). In his version, John himself becomes Sophia Achamoth, the disruptor whose overreach splits him, bringing forth even more Archons (his three nephews) who drain away what spiritual integrity he once had. “There were low-life doings at the big house on Harrow Street. The four Penandrew males each seemed to bring in seven cronies worse than himself. There were riotous doings there and the black maria was a frequent visitor to those doors. There was the aroma of stale evil in all this and John hadn't used to be a bad sort of man.” In Gnostic terms, rather than entering the harmony of the Pleroma  (the “Fullness” of divine reality), John and Zoe congeal into a degraded syzygy , a syzygy being a paired set of aeons  (divine emanations) meant to mirror balance and completeness. But their “ aionion ” (aeonic/age-belonging) mode of being is twisted into something grotesque, so that what should have sounded like true spiritual resonance becomes “clanging brass”: empty, noisy display instead of living fullness. Lafferty ties it all together in a stunning ending, with the brilliant metaphor of a descent from Classical Greek to Koine. The Penandrews are a unique couple taking their pleasures together all at once forever, and so violently as to drive the whole town stone-deaf—like those old stone-deaf statues, their only real kindred. For these two will not die in any natural course of things, not with that big loud bright brassy horn blowing in a distance, and at absolutely close range, all at once, everywhere, unclosed, lopsided. It's the ending that hasn't any end. The Stone is found, and it's an older texture than the philosophers believed. The transmutation is accomplished—into brass. Classic and koine: this is the Zoe who dies hardly forever; this is the Penandrew, the man of the wrong shape. The four men who know everything understand it now. And I do not. Five little Wise Men, sitting on the floor. One lived forever, and then there were four.” Current notes: