“The Forty-Seventh Island” is one of Lafferty’s weaker stories. It isn’t short on invention; what it lacks is the theotropic dissonance that gives his best work a prophetic intensity. That dissonance, where a sense of the divine and a refusal to collapse spiritual meaning into continuous allegory, is what I call theotropic. When it works, it keeps satire and mystery coiled together. But here, as in the “Horns on Their Heads,” Lafferty stays too close to his own ideological commitments. The satire is too narrow. The story buckles as satire and mystery decouple, dissociating meaning and leaving an aesthetic blemish. What should have been prophecy slips into polemic. “The Forty-Seventh Island”  wants to tell a parody of the Robinsonade that runs from Eden to Judgment. Its aesthetic failure is really cinched with the names of the forty-seven colonized mini-planets orbiting Selkirk Sun. Their names (Nietzsche Planet, Hegel, Mordecai, Darwin, Huxley, Freud, Luther, Calvin, Cromwell, Voltaire, Rousseau, Situation Ethics, Punk Rock, Horse Robber, Rolling Stone, etc.) are a sneeringly parodic inventory of secular modernity: rationalist, materialist, and progressive. Some names here, like Darwin, Freud, and Marx, are tokens of disenchantment. They are the kinds of suspicion Lafferty sees as stripping the cosmos of sacrament. It is of a piece with what Lafferty had written decades before in Dotty : The implications were staggering. Augustine was wrong, Petronius was right. Aquinas was wrong, Voltaire was right. Christ was wrong, Calvin was right. Francis was wrong, Marx was right. Hegel, Nietzsche were right, theirs was the only world. One must learn to live in it without retching. More was wrong, Roosevelt was right. Freud was right, Lenin, Karl Zaleski, Kitty Kark — all the little mice were right, all the toads and night crawlers, all the mwenchers and liars and thieves and politicians. All others were hypocrites and fools, bubble chasers. Other planetary names, like “Kent State,” “Stamp the Rooster,” and “Controlled Despair,” work a little differently, but this is Lafferty at his crankiest (“Stamp the Rooster,” for example, is from Oklahoma ballots, where the Democrats are Roosters; William Bernard Ziff, Sr. was a prominent Zionist and media mogul). Whether justified or not, it comes across as too raw a denunciation of a worldview Lafferty sees as synthetic, self-congratulatory, and smug. The theotropic arc flattens into caricature because of how it is handled. So what is this worldview in Lafferty’s mind? It’s the Weltanschauung  of American modernity that, for him, is less than a world. It is also unfit to replace the World he believed had collapsed in his lifetime. It looks upon the world as the liberal order sees it: self-assured, secular, organized around systems of social coherence, yet intellectually incoherent. It thinks it is the only contender. The sharpest edge of the satire falls on the post-1960s progressive American: urban, college-educated, rhetorically egalitarian—quietly smug when technocratic, and not so quietly smug when rocking out. This figure believes in rational ascent: history as the self-elevation of humankind through psychology, science, bureaucracy, and possessive-expressive individualism. Even unknowingly, this caricature reveres Freud, Darwin, Marx, Situation Ethics, and Rolling Stone , blind to how cheaply they sit beside each other. One question is whether the story flirts with antisemitic tropes. There is some ambiguity here, but it seems directed more broadly at a constellation of ideologies—including those elements that Lafferty opposed—so that any antisemitic resonance is more collateral than deliberate. Lafferty’s complaint, as usual, is that such things displace transcendence. They constitute pseudo-dulia. What binds them is not reason but reverence. There’s no coherence, only curation. The nominal cluster becomes a single satirical unit. Lafferty swings it like a sledgehammer: synthetic faith is blind to its own liturgies. This is the world Hugo Katz claims to purify, but really, what he cares about is the trash. His modernity fears mystery and sterilizes what it can’t explain. If that sounds too simple, you’re right. It’s why the story doesn’t work. In the story, Hugo Katz, commander of the colony and guardian of rationalist purity, embodies Lafferty’s satire of exaggerated liberal secular humanism. He is also its shadow side, a parody of liberal epistemic paranoia, obsessed with “leaks,” “illicit meadows,” and “unauthorized imagination.” His goal is purification, biological and ideological. The colonists must be made fit for the next stage of secular evolution. The snakes (kaleidoscopic, musically inept) become the supernatural remainder he cannot eliminate. They refuse taxonomic clarity. They are biologically impossible, unreal, alien, symbols. Lafferty writes: They were persons with their diamond-bright personeyes shining out in ever-new recognitions. They were aromas, evocative and prescient, allegorical and impossibly foreign. They could give out any odor imaginable, and they themselves had overreaching imagination in this. They could give odors on command or suggestion. They were companionable, and yet they weren't pushy. For Hugo, this ambiguity is both a social pathology and a form of social contagion. For the Phelans, especially Antoinette Phelan, there is a full awareness that their strangeness is the strangeness of the zoon anthropikon , these snakes with “personeyes.” Hugo’s hatred (and the joke of the story lies in this point) is odium theologicum , pure and simple. This aspect of the story works, but gets lost. So does its other weird moment of zoon anthropikon : “What was the unguent that you kneaded into those deep gashes that you tore in Frederik, Antoinette?” Steven Huckleby asked as the group of them, along with the Shadow-Man, who was made out of paper-thin slate stone, went down to the white rock in front of Shadrack's Cave. “Snake eggs,” Antoinette said. “ Culebra caleidoscopia  snake eggs. They are so small, and they survive and hatch so well! Snake eggs in incubation jelly, with ‘Run-Away Fertility Inducer’ added. There will be snakes aplenty wherever they go. And they'll be cared for and not allowed to perish; there is a forever promise on that. They really will remind them of us.” Lafferty often flips the profane into the sacred. “Horns on Their Heads” fails better: devil’s horns become the horns of Moses, carrying the full imagery of horns in biblical symbolism. “The Forty-Seventh Island” attempts a similar act of countersignification with snakes. Both stories fail for the same reason, I think: the satire and the countersignification are so polarized that they exist on different registers and never settle into the open theotropic dissonance that makes Lafferty’s best work so compelling. When it works, Lafferty's theotropic dissonance dissolves his genius for satire and mystery in the same solution. When either is overexposed, the other precipitates out: "They were companionable, and yet they weren't pushy.” Current Notes:

The question then arises, what poverty is required by the practice of this counsel or, in other words, what poverty suffices for the state of perfection? The renunciation which is essential and strictly required is the abandonment of all that is superfluous, not that it is absolutely necessary to give up the ownership of all property, but a man must be contented with what is necessary for his own use. Then only is there a real detachment which sufficiently mortifies the love of riches, cuts off luxury and vain glory, and frees from the care for worldly goods. Cupidity, vain glory, and excessive solicitude are, according to St. Thomas, the three obstacles which riches put in the way of acquiring perfection ( Summa , II-II, Q. clxxxviii, a. 7). —Arthur Vermeersch, Arthur. "Poverty." The Catholic Encyclopedia , Vol. 12. Lafferty’s stories brim over with big ideas, some of them confrontational, especially if you don’t share his perspective. When I considered writing about this, one story immediately came to mind: "Calamities of the Last Pauper." It’s one of his crankier works, unlikely to garner much affection, yet fascinating and overlooked. The story addresses poverty, divine order, and utopian consequences, setting the stage for a broader exploration. It’s also a significant story because its theme was important to Lafferty, yet one I suspect many readers would part ways with him over. That is part of what makes it worth discussing. It sheds some light on his ideas within his broader work, particularly in Past Master  (1968), through the depiction of poverty and suffering in Cathead. When confronted with such immiseration, I imagine some readers thinking, This must be just a metaphor. Surely he doesn’t actually believe this kind of misery is justifiable. In this light, Lafferty’s traditionally Catholic views allow him to craft what can appear to be anti-versions of Le Guin’s "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" (1973). He enjoys provoking readers by writing such stories, adding another layer to his confrontational style. The story opens after an apocalypse: the world has eliminated poverty, but the result is disaster. Society now struggles in the aftermath of this well-intended change. The cause of the disaster? The world eradicated poverty. Before the apocalypse, one holdout remained: John Bochtan. He refused to be reclassified as anything but a pauper, making him an inconvenient anomaly and prime material for a public spectacle. Lafferty begins by addressing us directly: This account is for those who were too young or too unborn to have seen the denouement of ‘The Death of the Last Pauper’ live (the death was live) on the Greenbaum-Brannagan Late Late Speak Your Mind Show. And ninety-six percent of today's population are too young to have seen it. The trick of the story is that Bochtan isn’t poor in the sense of lacking material resources. As The Catholic Encyclopedia  puts it: "The vow of poverty does not necessarily or as a general rule exclude the capacity to possess in common—that is, to have a shared stock of property at the collective disposal of its possessors—so long as they do not use it in a manner contrary to accepted rules and customs." Building on this theological vision of poverty, as a detachment from excess rather than merely a lack of material wealth, Lafferty creates a scenario designed to challenge non-Christian notions of wealth and spiritual poverty, taking these ideas to their extreme. “John Bochtan had a personality that had made him unpopular even when there were numerous paupers. Bochtan was what used to be called a wise guy (they don’t have them anymore), what used to be called a ‘show boat’ (they don’t have them anymore either). In addition to being the last poor person in the world, he may have been the last wise guy and the last show boat as well. And these types simply could not be allowed to exist in a modern society. John had the use of plenty of money and property, including a yacht with a crew, but he refused to take title to these things. He swore that they would reclassify him out of this poverty only over his dead body.” So there we have it. Bochtan has all the amenities of great wealth. Yet he truly embodies a salt-of-the-earth quality—a poverty of spirit. He is a smart-ass and a showboat. Still, he reflects the New Testament ideal of detachment from worldliness. This means his relationship with material things is not disordered. But this kind of poverty is no longer tolerated by the viewers of the Greenbaum-Brannagan Late Late Speak Your Mind Show. Powerbrokers like Pasqual Ratrunner ( “The poor we will not always have with us” ) want Bochtan gone. Towering demiurges, prophets, and weathermen warn of catastrophe if he—the last pauper—disappears. When Bochtan is murdered live on television by Hit-Man Henson, the world descends into chaos. The earth shakes. Storms rage. Waters desalinate. Yet sea levels rise as the rocks give up their water. This is a Lafferty twist on Exodus  17:1-7 and Numbers  20:2-13. In those stories, water flows from the rocks of Horeb and Meribah—classical symbols of God’s provision and miraculous intervention. What looks like punishment is, in fact, love: God caring enough about people to send them back to the Ice Age. In this frozen future, everyone is destitute. The story is recorded under these dire circumstances. At the end, we learn the narrator inscribes it on the shoulder blades of a Woolly Rhinoceros. “For a while there I feared that I would not be able to wrap this account up properly. I had used up everything I had to write on. And I had gone out hunting four days straight and not killed the prey I needed to finish this chronicle. But this morning I killed one in the first hour, a large, male, Woolly Rhinoceros. In another hour I had what I needed out of the carcass. Now I have something to write on again.” Another thing Lafferty is doing here is pushing his ongoing critique of the media. We have a global talk show that serves as a stage for divine intervention. The Greenbaum-Brannagan Late Late Speak Your Mind Show  reaches the entire world in all languages simultaneously, with every television set, in Lafferty’s telling phrase, “Pentecostally-equipped.” He repeatedly shortens this to GBLLSYMS, a name that carries (for me) a phonetic echo of “bull systems” and “bullshit.” Lafferty certainly wants us to see this universal broadcast as a contrast to the real Pentecost (Acts 2:6–11). Instead of the Holy Spirit granting understanding, we get a cheapjack substitute. Google Translate avant la lettre. In place of divine revelation, television. A counterfeit miracle. A counter-Pentecost that replaces spiritual unity with mass communication. This is the hubris of Babel. Shared understanding is a great good, but submission to manufactured consensus is not. Yet the story offers a counterbalance—the show’s open lines to "numinous persons." It suggests that no part of life is fully secular. Lafferty writes: But of these shows, it was only the forerunning GBLLSYMS that had the "numinous valves" on their switchboards. By reason of these, all numinous persons (plapper-angels, demiurges, elementals, principalities, specially-impressed mortals, and God himself) would automatically have preference given to their calls to the programs. Lafferty even has God Himself compose verses within the story: When none be poor and none have fault, And all own silver laver; — The leaven turns to lump, the salt No longer keeps its savor. But instead of listening, the world is too busy with entertainment. Going deeper, "Calamities of the Last Pauper" is about the destruction of sacred order. Lafferty suggests that society and creation are not just material arrangements; they participate in divine meaning. Within that order, the poor hold a cherished place. As St. Lawrence said, “The poor are the treasure of the Church.” Their presence calls others to virtue: compassion, generosity, and dependence on God. Everyone tuned into the Greenbaum-Brannagan Late Late Speak Your Mind Show  is eager to see the last pauper erased. When he dies, they don’t realize they’ve killed more than a man. They’ve severed the final filament of meaning holding their world together. The poor weren’t just inconvenient. They were Christ’s instruments of grace. At its heart, the story presents poverty of spirit as a form of grace—the visible reminder of Christ’s presence among the lowly. Lafferty builds on the Gospel’s depiction of Christ identifying with the poor, as in the words, “I was hungry, and you gave me food.” Had the world tolerated Bochtan, perhaps grace would have remained. Instead, by erasing poverty, the television hosts and viewers erase something deeper: their connection to mercy and meaning. And the oceans become unsalted because the savor has gone out of the world. For Lafferty, this is a profound perversion of justice—a world that convinces itself it has solved poverty by erasing the poor in spirit. Lafferty knew that Rerum Novarum  (1891) set the foundation for modern Catholic social thought. Pope Leo XIII affirmed that the poor must be protected from exploitation and that class conflict must be resolved through justice and charity. This did not mean eliminating an entire class: “The great mistake is to take up with the notion that class is naturally hostile to class, and that the wealthy and the working men are intended by nature to live in mutual conflict. So irrational and so false is this view that the direct contrary is the truth.” ( Rerum Novarum , §19) But the media-centered world of "Calamities of the Last Pauper" takes the opposite approach. It refuses to coexist with poverty in any form, deciding instead that the only solution is to abolish the poor themselves. This is the nightmare of modern ideologies. Both capitalist and communist visions have, at times, treated the poor as a problem to be solved rather than as people to be loved. Lafferty exaggerates this impulse to its extreme, presenting a world where poverty is “cured” not through justice, but through categorization, reclassification, and ultimately, execution. Quadragesimo Anno  (1931) built on Leo XIII’s teaching by warning against both excessive individualism, which ignores the duty to the poor, and collectivist tyranny, which sees people as disposable in service of a utopian ideal. In Bochtan’s death, Lafferty gives us the worst version of both. The world is so obsessed with its own material success that it refuses to let one man exist outside its system. His dignity is overridden by the collective. "Calamities of the Last Pauper" fiercely rejects the false distinction between spiritual and material poverty, a compelling premise. But I’m torn between two readings: On one hand, Lafferty doesn’t reconcile these forms of poverty because the damned world of the story refuses to. This isn’t an oversight; it’s the whole point. The poor aren’t just erased; they take the world’s meaning with them. On the other hand, the story feels like it needs some synthesis, even if just a cockeyed Laffertian one, to make sense of spiritual poverty in a post-scarcity society. While Lafferty often pulls against definitive endings, here the lack of closure suggests, at least to me, that the inciting idea hasn’t been pushed far enough. This, I believe, is why the framing device falls flat. I would have preferred fire to ice. Current notes:

On my mind today is “How They Gave It Back,” partly because of our violent times, and partly because it's a response to the American crisis that began in the 1960s. Today, the Washington Post  ran an article titled “America Enters a New Age of Political Violence.” Today, one will find similar pieces in the New York Times  and the Wall Street Journal . In The Atlantic is Graeme Wood''s "Political Violence Could Devour Us All," where he writes, In the past day, some have murmured that we are returning to the 1960s, and a norm of political assassinations. Martin Luther King and the Kennedy brothers then, Kirk now. The old joke about the ’60s is that if you claim to remember them, you were not actually there and were instead having another ’50s while the counterculture passed you by. The playwright Sam Shepard (who was definitely there) had what I take to be a clear and unromanticized memory of that time. “The reality of it to me was chaos, and the idealism didn’t mean anything,” he told an interviewer in 2000. He said it was an emotional drain he could not wait to escape. “I was on the tail of this tiger that was wagging itself all over the place and was spitting blood in all directions.” This is the mental climate of “How They Gave It Back,” with its implicit judgment: Who would want it? The story follows Mayor John, whose full name is Giuseppe Juan Schlome O’Hanlon, of Big Island (Manhattan). He was once a dignified leader, but now he is broken and irrational. He shrills and keens and moans, chained to his desk by law, unable to leave until he can sell what is left of Manhattan. The city has become a wasteland of gangs and violence. There are “people unburied in the streets, people knifed down hourly, people crazy and empty-eyed or glitter-eyed.” The shackles will release Mayor John only if a buyer meets the requirement of “Fair Value.” His chance comes when three Indian officials from the Midlands Gun and Rod Club arrive, offering hatchets and blunderbusses and more in trade. The exchange is accepted as the island’s “Original Value from Original Entailment,” and John is freed. Then he is shot. The new owners turn the island into a most dangerous game-style hunting preserve. This is a grim story, told with grim wit. It is a long way from yesterday’s “The Doggone Highly Scientific Door.” Irony is everywhere, and the satirical boundaries are destabilizing. Some edge-case ambiguity complicates our interpretation of the story’s moral shape. For example, how are we supposed to evaluate the three Indians—a petroleum geologist, an electronics engineer, and a lawyer—and the funny murder of Mayor John? This is the angry moral humor one finds in Jonathan Swift. "Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe how much it altered her appearance for the worse." I'll list some ideas from the story that stand out to me. Colonialism and reparations. By having the island sold back for its original price (the material equivalent of sixty Dutch guilders), Lafferty takes an axe to the idea that restorative justice is simple. As the buyers’ lawyer puts it, “the island has reverted. It’s really worthless . . . Perhaps its reverted value is now its original value.” The story mocks both the initial colonial deal—treated here as a kind of unpaid debt now settled with “Fifty hatchets,” “Twenty guns,” and “One brass frying-pan”—and the belief that historical theft can be neatly undone. Lafferty seems to suggest that true justice is elusive, especially when violence and greed are involved. As two tentacles of Ultimate Justice itself conclude, when one asks about the original twenty-four dollars, the other replies, “No, no . . . That was only the estimated value placed on the material. There was no specie paid.” Then there’s the question of urban governance and optimism. Mayor John himself is a satire of several left-liberal ideologies. Born into a political family, he “was given the names to please as many groups as possible.” He’s an idealistic reformer trapped in an impossible situation, a figure for real-world urban leaders facing crises they can’t solve. Lafferty also targets what we now call identity politics (a term coined in 1977). John’s multi-ethnic identity and popular rhetoric—calling himself “man of the people” and his election a “high triumph”—are undercut by the anarchy of Big Island. Even his former commissioner calls him “the ultimate patsy” for trying to govern it. This is consistent with the larger pattern of Lafferty’s work: political idealism and structural rot are connected. And what has been rotted out? Well, it's law, equity, and civilization itself. "How They Gave It Back" is withering here. The only law left is a literal-minded cosmic mechanism that enforces form over substance: the “psychic-coded lock” governed by the “Equity Factor.” On one level, this is the idea that the letter kills, but the spirit gives life. On another, it resembles Sittlichkeit , an idea that has left an impression on me. It is the lived actuality of freedom within ethical life. Sittlichkeit is more than duty: it is the unity of subjective will and objective institutions. That unity has collapsed on Big Island. The trap mechanism that pins Mayor John is satisfied once the deal is done: “He had disposed of the island in equity. He had gotten Fair Value for it, or Value Justified, or at least Original Value from Original Entailment. And it sufficed.” The universal of Ultimate Justice has become removed from life, disincarnational, and monstrous. Finally, there is violence and human nature. This is Lafferty holding up a mirror to human brutality. I’ve written about the bloodsmell in his work, how it can be sacramental. But here it is debased. Joyless mayhem, or counterfeit joy, or mirthless mirth. I am not sure what to call it, but we see it too much in our culture now. As one gang leader says, seeing the blunderbusses, “They spark them off, and it’s wonderful. Cuts people right in two.” The hunters quote Hemingway: “‘There is no sport equal to the hunting of an armed man.’ Ah, we’ll hunt them here.” Beneath the wit, Lafferty is saying something brutal about real tendencies. The murder of Mayor John : Mayor John was free. He started to run from the room, fell down on his crippled leg, and arose and ran once more. And was caught in a blunderbuss blast. And then the great hunt began. The three members of the Midlands Gun and Rod Club had most sophisticated weapons. They were canny and smooth. This was the dangerous big-game hunt they had always dreamed of. And their prey were armed and wild and truculent and joyous. It would be good. It's not.

He ate and drank the precious words, His spirit grew robust; He knew no more that he was poor, Nor that his frame was dust. He danced along the dingy days, And this bequest of wings Was but a book. What liberty A loosened spirit brings! - Emily Dickinson Lafferty’s “Bequest of Wings” first appeared in the 1979 anthology Rooms of Paradise , though notes in the Tulsa archive show he completed it on January 23, 1975. The story is thematically elusive, and that elusiveness makes me wonder when he began it. Like Lafferty’s other stories about generational conflict, it challenges the appeal of false transcendence. But it is carefully measured, and also remarkably generous. It treats the young (“the lightest and brightest”) with real sympathy. More specifically, it handles Angela Firmholder, who becomes entangled in a commercial version of that transcendence, with genuine pathos. In the anthology’s foreword, Roger Zelazny offers a few lines on each story. But when he reaches Lafferty’s, he breaks the pattern. “No matter what I say about a R. A. Lafferty story I will somehow be wrong,” he writes, “because he puts so much into one. So I'll back off and play it safe to the extent of observing that his stories are always entertaining, provoking and impossible to anticipate. No exception here, either.” Given how carefully balanced this story is, it’s easy to see what Zelazny means. Still, this post is an attempt to work out some of that. Because “Bequest of Wings” is, on one level, about the cultural-war aspect of intergenerational conflict, it loosely belongs with stories like “Horns on Their Heads,” where Lafferty explores what that conflict means. But here, years after writing “Horns,” his view is more complicated. In the story, a family grapples with a biological change affecting the “lightest and brightest” adolescents, who sprout wing-like bones. Readers learn that this is an incomplete mutation and that a second and third mutation will finish the process. But none of those with the first mutation will be ancestors of those with the second mutation. Angela Firmholder, the daughter, has this early form of the mutation. Over the course of the story, she spends time at Cloudy Joe’s Drug Store, which is suspended in the air by a Fortean Vector. Her parents, Potter and Peggy, watch with growing worry as she joins other young people in a sky-bound cult, flying by attaching struts and feathers to the new pinion bones. At the same time, adults like Ace Whizz-Bang view these changes with a mix of curiosity and disdain, and speak grimly of the inevitable “clipping” that follows. Angela undergoes a cult ritual in which her pinions are clipped, and the story ends with her body returned to her parents. The pinion-clipping aspect of the story is one of the most violent in all of Lafferty, though we do not see Angela experience it directly. Instead, Lafferty inserts a paratext written by a character named Doctor Hexbird, who describes what happens to the young people with the mutation: “The fingers and hands become so elongated and splayed that they can no longer be used for human hands. They cannot grasp, they cannot manipulate. It would almost be better if the hands were chopped off completely. What must be chopped off, however, are two outlaw growths on each side, two very long bone spurs called the greater and the lesser pinion bones. These new spur-bones change the whole deportment of the victim; this is the reason that they must be removed after they have become hard bone. They can be cut with bone-saws, but in unapproved and cultic operations they are cut with bolt-cutters. Then these bones must be pulled out of the flesh for their entire length. This bloody laying-open of breast and shoulders and neck and arms and back to get the long bones out is a traumatic horror. The thirty per cent mortality in these cultic operations is outrageous.” The entire story draws on the physical horror of pinioning, a procedure that involves surgically removing part of the wing, usually the distal joint, to permanently prevent flight. It is often done to young waterfowl or ornamental birds to keep them confined without the need for an enclosure. Because it is painful and irreversible, the practice is controversial. In many countries, it is regulated or restricted, and alternatives such as temporary wing clipping or secure housing are encouraged for ethical reasons. The detailed description of the wing structure and the violence add considerably to the intellectual horror. And I think it matters to picture clearly what Lafferty wants us to see: where the clipping takes place, how the hands are elongated, and the other details. In other words, to really think through the biological homology. If that’s part of what’s happening, another part of the horror is emotional. The title, drawn from Emily Dickinson, suggests that Lafferty’s imagination meets hers, and both are wonderfully weird imaginations. Dickinson often writes of angels, feathers, wings, and of pain, exactingly rendered. One of her stanzas could even be a commentary on Lafferty’s story: Essential Oils — are wrung — The Attar from the Rose Be not expressed by Suns — alone — It is the gift of Screws — Dickinson makes it impossible to separate the fragrance from the violence. She seems to say that this could not be so beautiful if it were not also so violent. It is Flannery O’Connor territory, the place of violent grace. The final image of Angela captures this blood and beauty: The young ‘flight’ people brought Angela down and laid her on the cloud-moss bed. She was white with fright and pain, and red with blood. But she smiled. Another reason to see Dickinson as more than just the source of the story’s title is that Lafferty would have recognized her poem as more than a tribute to books and reading. It is an apocalyptic poem, shaped by the Book of Revelation, one of the texts Dickinson herself named as most dear to her. When the speaker in her poem eats and drinks the precious words and feels the spirit grow strong, we are in the eschatological world of the New Testament, where St. John of Patmos eats the book in Revelation 10:7–10: But in the days of the voice of the seventh angel, when he shall begin to sound, the mystery of God should be finished, as he hath declared to his servants the prophets. And the voice which I heard from heaven spake unto me again, and said, Go and take the little book which is open in the hand of the angel which standeth upon the sea and upon the earth. And I went unto the angel, and said unto him, Give me the little book. And he said unto me, Take it, and eat it up; and it shall make thy belly bitter, but it shall be in thy mouth sweet as honey. And I took the little book out of the angel's hand, and ate it up; and it was in my mouth sweet as honey: and as soon as I had eaten it, my belly was bitter. Read with these lines in mind, and with the bitterness and sweetness, the story’s attar-and-screw-like shape becomes more distinct. The harp music played by Angela and the other “lightest and brightest,” which descends like honey, recalls the harping of angels in Revelation. One possibility is the six-week period of the mutation (“They’re just allowed six weeks of it after full sprout, and the time’s nearly up.”) alludes to the 42 months of suffering in Revelation. After all, there are 42 days in six weeks. I have a hard time believing this to be just a coincidence. Two ideas from Thinking With Lafferty help open this up further. The first is theotropic dissonance. This is most visible in the wings. Lafferty draws on Dickinson and the Book of Revelation, but the wings can also be bat-like. The teenagers make their own from struts and tar-coated canvas. Ace Whizz-Bang, one of the older figures, says to Potter Famealyous, “Do you know, Mealyous, bat wings used to be cited against the old Natural Selection theory?” Their names are playful. Ace suggests a pilot who needs machines to fly. Potter, as pater familias , carries a faded authority. The passage itself refers to St. George Jackson Mivart, a Catholic thinker who opposed Darwin and whose critiques prompted revisions to On the Origin of Species . Darwin said of him, “Though he means to be honorable, he is so bigoted that he cannot act fairly.” But the bat-wing reference does more. It evokes older Christian imagery, in which such wings mark devils. What Lafferty does with horns in “Horns on Their Heads,” he does with wings in “Bequest.” The theotropic  element takes its strongest form in the story’s final image: “There was the musical tone of distal feathers ruffling in the wind of a long swoop downwards. They sounded ever so much like wind-harps.” But Lafferty does not leave the moment in a purely spiritual register. He complicates it by giving Angela’s mother, Peggy, the line, “Oh, how cult!” The other concept is iconographic insetting. We see this in the music: “And the wind-harps that they played upon had a full and gusty sound. The cult songs that they sang had trivial words and tunes, but their renditions were superb. It was like honey from Heaven when those sounds drifted down. They were airy songs, sky songs, soaring songs, pinnacle songs. There was a complexity to their music that wasn’t to be found in even the worst of the Rocks and Grocks.” The divide between the quality of the music and the poverty of the lyrics is the story's icon. And against all of this is still the relentless critique of Cloudy Joe’s Drugstore, which sells the cheapjack materials of false transcendence to the lightest and brightest. My current conclusion about the story is that it is deeply interesting because Lafferty condemns the falseness of false transcendence, yet sees that something has been transcended nonetheless. In this way, Lafferty draws on biblical typology, the pattern of type and antitype. The incomplete first stage of the mutation of the lightest and brightest serves as a type, awaiting its antitype in the full mutation. The story even poses the question (“Why do the ‘lightest and the brightest’ of these mutated flyers accept the cropping of their wings and their frequent deaths?”) and supplies its own answer (“They accept it because it is necessary for the mutation.”). Biologically, its mechanism is opaque, which is why the narrative nudges me toward a typological reading: the mutilated wings act as prefiguration, not as evolutionary explanation. For that reason, what happens cannot be captured by false transcendence. It is partial transcendence, baffling only as long as the pattern remains unfinished. Fulfillment would mean moving from Potter Firmholder’s complaint to his little angel Angela (“Do you have to play that damned wind-harp every evening?”) to Revelation (“And I heard a voice from heaven, as the voice of many waters, and as the voice of a great thunder: and I heard the voice of harpers harping with their harps”).

Lafferty had a soft spot for Neanderthals and every kind of ape-man. My favorite instance of this appears at the end of Arrive at Easterwine  (1971), his most spiritual novel, where Epikt adopts his walking ape extension, holding a tin plate in one hand and a giant knife in the other. Lafferty’s fascination with prehistoric hominids has made me wonder what he knew about them. Had his library survived, it might have revealed something about his reading on the subject. In its absence, we can trace one influence behind his use of the trope. Whether in The Men Who Knew Everything  stories, The Elliptical Grave , or the story I want to focus on here—“Boomer Flats”—Lafferty’s depiction of prehistoric hominids is shaped by a moment in early twentieth-century intellectual history. It was an episode that drew considerable press attention and became a defining event in the writing lives of two of Lafferty’s favorite authors, Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton: their public brawl with H. G. Wells over his Outline of History (1919–1920). Wells was an atheist and a public intellectual eager to popularize Darwinism, and he leaned heavily on the idea that Neanderthal man posed a threat to belief in the God of ethical monotheism. For him, the prehistoric hominid was not just a scientific curiosity but a real blow to the idea of divine creation. Belloc and Chesterton disagreed. They saw in Wells more than a dispassionate interest in furthering scientific literacy. He was a progressive moralist, and Neanderthals were part of a broader ideological project, consistent with Wells’s other social views on ideas like free love. All aimed to undercut traditional religious and anthropocentric convictions. To them, the Neanderthal in Outline of History wasn’t a neutral piece of data from deep time but a polemicized weapon. One could hardly look at the illustrations of Neanderthal man in Wells’s Outline  and not sense how jarring the contrast would be when set alongside Hamlet’s encomium: " What piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving, how express and admirable in action, how like an angel in apprehension, how like a god! The beauty of the world. The paragon of animals." Chesterton took up arms against Wells in several places, most notably in The Everlasting Man  (1925), and returned to the subject of Neanderthals in essays throughout the years following the debate. But the fiercest counterstrike came from Belloc in Mr. Belloc Still Objects to Mr. Wells’s Outline of History (1926). [Wells] has got hold of the idea that the discovery of Neanderthal skulls and skeletons destroys Catholic theology. He imagines that we wake up in the middle of the night in an agony of imperilled faith because a long time ago there was a being which was as human as we are apparently in his brain capacity, in his power to make instruments, to light fires, and in his reverent burial of the dead, but who probably, perhaps certainly, bent a little at the knee, carried his head forward, was sloping in the chin. (24) In a private letter, Lafferty wrote that Belloc and Chesterton were the best writers in England in their day. Whatever one makes of that judgment, there is no doubt they loomed large in his imagination. He was an indefatigable reader of everything the two men wrote. His own style is in part a blend of the two writers. From Belloc, he takes the epistemic stand toward truth one finds in classical prose. From Chesterton, he takes the funhouse-mirror approach to the surprising truth. In short, the bent, simian extension that Epikt takes at the end of Arrive at Easterwine had long lived in Lafferty’s imagination. The posture, the physiognomy—none of it is threatening to faith, is its import. Here, modernity is absorbed, not resisted. And so the hominid figure became a recurring motif for him. He turns it on later thinkers like Pierre Teilhard de Chardin who comes in for particularly brutal treatment. To see how this can play out in Lafferty's work, consider "Boomer Flats," a story whose plot, though risky to paraphrase, involves three eminent scientists—Arpad Arkabaranan, Willy McGilly, and Velikof Vonk—who travel to a ragged riverside settlement called Boomer Flats in search of legendary missing links, known as ABSMs (Abominable Snowmen). There, they find a community living by the mud-banks of the Cimarron River, where people mix with bears, giants, and a figure known only as the Comet. Despite the locals' apparent primitiveness, two of the scientists—Willy and Velikof—recognize that these folk are not monsters but something deeper: an underlying “scrub” race of humanity, the foundation beneath modern man. When a catastrophic flood arrives, the inhabitants of the Boomer Flats survive through a strange ritual: they lie beneath the river with stones on their chests. Willy and Velikof join them. Arpad panics and dies. The two who remain gain a broader, stranger understanding of what it means to be human—one that includes comets, giants, and catfish spirits. So what is going on here if we read the story in light of the Neanderthal debate? On one side, we have Wells, whose evolutionary materialism claims that prehistoric hominids are natural facts that disprove biblical accounts of creation and providence. On the other hand, we have Belloc and Chesterton, who think this misses the point, and that prehistoric hominids, if anything, just point to the complexity of the Divine plan and the broadness of the human family. Lafferty sets this up as the conceit of three scientists looking for the missing link—abominable snowmen—in rural Oklahoma, which is funny in itself. What the story becomes is theological anthropology. Arpad Arkabaranan turns out to be the Wellsian figure. He yearns for the empirical, sensational missing link. His name perhaps even points to his rigid mindset. Our old friend Willy McGilly is our Chesterbelloc stand-in. He’s comfortable with paradox. Local lore doesn’t bother him at all because he embodies Chestertonian (un)common sense. And then we have Dr. Velikof Vonk, who we learn is a neo-Neanderthal, one of the story’s most playful ideas: the missing link always among us, civilized, witty, and Catholic-friendly. The dynamic of the three “Magi,” one of them unworthy, culminates in Arpad’s refusal to accept the mud-based baptism from the flood. It is as if Lafferty is saying something like, look, it’s not the existence of “missing links” that threatens faith, but the inability to see how they are integrated into the sacramental continuum of creation—what I have called Lafferty’s sacramental poesis. As elsewhere in Lafferty’s work, mud and clay carry deep symbolic weight. He renders mud both comic and cosmic. The image of mothers licking their children into shape recalls God forming Adam—whose name means red clay—from the dust and breathing life into him. Here, the raw stuff of the earth is sacramentalized: the grimy Cimarron River, rightly seen, is not filth but grace. As Willy McGilly knows, good fish egg stew has “a tang of river sewage”—no part of matter lies outside God’s redemptive design. Theological anthropology comes to the fore with the question of the under-people in the story. They are shabby, mud-homely, shapeless. They inhabit the margins of time and places. But they are integral to who we are now as part of the human family—“the scrubs that bottom the breed,” as Lafferty puts it, the “foundation.” Over the course of the story, we learn that Vonk is one of these people, and that Willy McGilly is one of the Comet people, someone who understands and embodies the starry, universal dimension of Catholicism. “Boomer Flats” is a wonderful story. It’s also a pointed critique of H. G. Wells, the enemy of Lafferty’s heroes, a recurring fight that can reappear when Lafferty confronts his own adversaries, whom he sees as furthering the Wells agenda in his own time. In the story, the missing link turns out to be ordinary and extraordinary, which is very Chestertonian. The ABSMs are people in an unexpected, expected, sacramental dimension. The Chesterbellaffian rejoinder to neo-Wellianism comes through loudest in Willy McGilly’s radical acceptance that none of the weirdness poses a threat: all rational souls are shaped within a single, incarnational continuum. Finally, it might be worth noting how Lafferty transforms the Wells–Belloc debate into an invitation for the reader to participate. This culminates in a rare move in a Lafferty story. It is about as evangelical as he ever gets, and perhaps it is a sign of how personal this story was. He gives us his version of Romance’s great unifying device, de te fabula narratur : this story is about you, dear reader. He writes: One more is needed so that this set of Magi may be formed again. The other two aspects being already covered, the third member could well be a regularized person. It could be an older person of ability, an eminent. It would be a younger person of ability, a pre-eminent. This person may be you. Put your hand to it if you have the surety about you, if you are not afraid of green snakes in the cup (they'll fang the face off you if you're afraid of them), or of clay-mud, or of comet dust, or of the rollicking world between. Current notes:

But all the clocks in the city    Began to whirr and chime: ‘O let not Time deceive you,    You cannot conquer Time. — W. H. Auden, “As I Walked Out One Evening” Often, and now more often, Vincent felt that he was touching the fingers of the secret. And always, when he came near it, it had a little bit of the smell of the Pit. “The Six Fingers of Time” is a prenucleation Lafferty fantasy that already bears on questions at the center of his imaginative project: how to think the difference between eviternity and eternity, and how to render that difference in fictional form. In this early story, the distinction appears as a Faustian bargain made by a disreputable character, Charles Vincent, who gains a measure of wisdom, perhaps too late. Vincent has been called a hero, but he is not one. His name, which means “I conquer,” can be read as ironic or not, depending on what the reader hopes for him, since the story ends in ambiguity. Vincent accepts a bargain that persuades him he can conquer time. He learns instead that he cannot conquer death. Lafferty leaves open whether Vincent comes into the gift that does  conquer death. The story is an early instance of Lafferty’s half-horror, meant to apply philosophical pressure rather than to resolve itself. Charles Vincent awakens one morning and is surprised. The world has entered a state of near-stasis. Objects move with incredible slowness, water behaves like thick syrup, and people appear as immobile statues (they’re really just moving at an imperceptible pace). Vincent soon understands what is going on: he is moving much faster than everyone else. This makes it possible for him to polish off days of office work in what seems like minutes to the outside world. But Vincent wants to know what is really going on. He seeks a medical explanation from Dr. Mason, who suggests Vincent is sleepwalking. However, the doctor is privately curious about a report from a taxi driver who encountered an incredibly fast "ghost." The report matches Vincent’s self-reported accelerated actions. Vincent next meets a mysterious, faceless man in a dark club who identifies himself by various names, such as Zubarin and Schimm. The stranger explains that Vincent has the ability to enter an accelerated state because of his "extradigitalism." Vincent has a misshapen thumb, a vestige, and is part of the extradigital family. The stranger teaches Vincent mental diagrams so that he can enter and exit this state at will, but there is a warning: using the power is a race against self-destruction. Vincent immediately uses his ability to become filthy rich through petty theft. He masters dozens of languages and thousands of books. He crams years of experience into single nights. As he spends more time in the accelerated state, he notices something is changing. He is physically deteriorating. He is losing his hair and aging. As Vincent's health fails, he decides to try to understand what is, in fact, going on. He researches the history of six-fingered geniuses and ancient cuneiform tablets, and he becomes convinced that he is being watched by a race of "men from the Pit" who exist in an even higher state of acceleration. He meets these faceless men again, and when they offer to let him join their team, he refuses their offer. He will use his remaining time to find a "final truth" that will allow humanity to use the power without being controlled by the men from the Pit. At last, he discovers the key to defeating these entities, but it is too late. He dies quietly in a chair before he can publish his findings. Dr. Mason says that Vincent, though only thirty years old, died of extreme senility with the body of a ninety-year-old. The reader is left hanging. Let’s begin with Charles Vincent himself. He appears at first as a man well suited for the Pit. He is cruel and arrogant. He uses his speed to bully and humiliate those around him. He steals wallets and mocks his victims, stuffing the stolen items into their mouths. Robbery is not enough for him; he wants to strip others of dignity as well. He strikes athletes during matches for his own amusement. He slips live animals into the food of unsuspecting diners. His idea of “affection” leaves his coworker Jenny bruised and with loosened teeth. Other people are comic objects. He assaults museum guards who are simply doing their jobs. He abandons social obligation altogether and treats women badly. For most of the story, he feels no shame for the harm he causes.. There was pleasure in being able to shatter windows by chanting little songs . . . There was fun in petty thieving and tricks. He could take a wallet from a man's pocket and be two blocks away when the victim turned at the feel. He could come back and stuff it into the man's mouth as he bleated to a policeman... He would take food off forks on the way to mouths, put baby turtles and live fish into bowls of soup between spoonfuls of the eater . . . He unzippered persons of both sexes when they were at their most pompous . . . “I was always a boy at heart,” said Charles Vincent. I say all of this because Lafferty is such a fine comic writer that I think people tend to overlook what a lousy excuse for a human being Vincent is, and overlooking this means that if there is a redemption arc, it tends to be obscured. The question then becomes: if there is such an arc, what does it turn on? I’ll show my cards. Lafferty is playing an interesting game in this story. What Charles Vincent discovers is not an arcane formula for defeating the men of the Pit. This is not a tale in which he finds an obscure volume at the British Museum and learns how to abjure the servitors of Y’golonac. Vincent turns to the Bible as desperation rises, and there he learns that the real thing to conquer is not time but death. There, too, he learns who the men of the Pit are and what the sixth finger means, because the place where he can learn about the sixth digit is Scripture and the texts that gather around it, including the Book of Enoch , which Lafferty mined relentlessly for ideas. Or he doesn't. Lafferty leaves it open for you, dear reader, to decide. But if you want a typical Lafferty pattern, notice the link between his many Gregories and the Grigori of Enochic tradition. In the Old Testament, the sixth digit appears most clearly in 2 Samuel 21:20. The passage describes a “man of great stature” from Gath who had six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot, twenty-four digits in all. He is said to descend from Rapha and thus belongs to the lineage of giants known as the Rephaim. In biblical numerology, six usually marks imperfection or the merely human. It falls just short of the completeness and perfection associated with seven. Lafferty, however, treats the extra digit as a sign of the supernatural, a mark that places a person partly in another world. The subtext is a hidden or lost history, populated by monstrous lineages cut off from divine blessing. The source of that tradition is clear. It comes from the Book of Enoch . Lafferty gives a glimpse of this “other” chronology through the tablets Vincent studies: On the divergence of the basis itself and the confusion caused by — for it is Five, or it is Six, or Ten or Twelve, or Sixty or One Hundred . . . The reason, not clearly understood by the People, is that Six and the Dozen are First, and Sixty is a compromise in condescending to the people. For the Five, the Ten are late, and are no older than the People themselves. It is said, and credited, that the People began to count by Fives and Tens from the number of fingers on their hands. But before the People the—, for the reason that they had—, counted by Sixes and Twelves. There, the sixth digit is linked to the Nephilim, the giant offspring of human women and the Watchers, the fallen angels. The Book of Enoch  is concerned throughout with forbidden knowledge. It names Azazel—the principal figure, not the later minor demon —and describes how weaponry, magic, and other dangerous arts entered the human world. Chapters 72–82 deal with primeval knowledge of time itself. This knowledge is taught to humanity by the fallen beings, and later traditions and folklore associate that lore explicitly with polydactyly in the Nephilim. For these reasons, Lafferty forges connections in the story to ancient, pre-Flood races and to the giants who reappear after the Flood. If that sketches part of the story’s genealogy, what finally matters most is Lafferty’s preoccupation with both time and salvation. I have argued that time stands at the center of the ghost story: historical time, lived time, and eschatological time, and the way each relates to what is eternal. The best sources for Lafferty’s views on time, expressed directly rather than through fiction, are his letters, though he returns to the subject in interviews as well. Again and again, he comes back to orthodox Catholic accounts of time, even as he is willing to work out their more ingenious modal implications. Lafferty understands eternity as a state of absolute simultaneity, distinct from the linear and successive character of human time. Time has duration and sequence; eternity has neither. It exists as a constant “moment.” The Kingdom of Heaven is always “at hand,” but it remains separated from our world by a barrier thinner than the smallest instant of time. That barrier cannot be crossed by extending or multiplying temporal succession, even in experiences of extreme temporal dilation. Lafferty, therefore, stresses the limits of language in speaking about eternity. Even “simultaneity,” he says, fails to name a reality that lies beyond time itself. Theology and death are the primary intersections between these two states in Lafferty's philosophy. Recently, I have written about how he identifies the Second Coming as a point of contact between time and eternity. He thought that every individual encounters this event at the moment of their own death. That means that Charles Vincent experiences this, right off-page. When talking about time, Lafferty always has St. Augustine's concept of eviternity in mind, and as he grows as a writer, his games with eviternity in stories such as “Bank and Shoal of Time” and the Argo legend become ever more ingenious. The big conflict lies in the Pit's attempt to substitute time dilation for the eternal, a distinction Vincent eventually recognizes in his final confrontation with the faceless men: “But you are not sure either of surviving or receiving, nor could you accept the surety as sure. Now we have a very close approximation of eternity. When Time is multiplied by itself, and that repeated again and again, does that not approximate eternity?” “I don't believe that it does. But I will not be of you. One of you has said that I am too fastidious. So now will you say that you'll destroy me?” What stays consistent in his view of time is that the question of "when" spiritual events occur is essentially meaningless because eternity exists completely beyond sequence, lacking any "before" or "after." Death is a door through which all people arrive at the same universal point. It is the door through which the men of the Pit desperately want to avoid stepping because past it are the other three of the four final things in Catholic theology: judgment, heaven, and hell.

“But on the third hand, and often to the exasperation of critics, the writer usually knows what is wrong or right with a story better than a critic does.” — Letter The drowsy stillness of the afternoon was shattered by what sounded to his strained senses like G. K. Chesterton falling on a sheet of tin. — P. G. Wodehouse To start a fight with someone who loves Chesterton, say that Chesterton was an alcoholic. Though it is in poor taste to mention, one of the qualities Lafferty shared with his favorite writer is immoderation with food and alcohol. Immoderation, as a sign of spiritual disorder, was one barrier in Chesterton’s progress toward sainthood more than a decade ago, and I am one of those people who thinks the mysterious period of illness in Chesterton’s life was related to his drinking. When I read “Oh, Those Trepidatious Eyes!,” I find myself thinking, against my will, that both Chesterton and Lafferty paid for not taking better care of themselves. Chesterton died too young, and Lafferty suffered his first heart attack too young. The strokes that silenced Lafferty for nearly a decade at the end of his life were no doubt connected to the way he treated his body—that is to say, badly. At one point, before the false teeth, he was apparently down to a yellow tooth. There is not much self-consciousness in Lafferty about being a fat man, but it is hard not to see, as many readers have, a portrait of himself in Berigrew Bagley. Lafferty was asked about it. His answer was disingenuous. He was sometimes disingenuous, as when he said he didn’t put his religion into his works beyond Past Master. One suspects he was self-conscious about his weight. Why? Because he repeatedly called himself a fat man. It is also simply a fact that there is a great deal of food in Lafferty’s work, and he is extremely memorable on the subject, from the Big Breakfasts of Space Chantey to the dead dog in “Once on Aranea.” I think he is brilliant on food. Much of that brilliance centers on grotesque eating. People like to point out the Lafferty violence, but food is as libidinal and grotesque as blood in his fiction. What to do with that detail is not clear to me, except to note that there are stories in which shame and food, and censure and food, are tightly knotted. To give two examples, consider “The Doggone Highly Scientific Door” and “Pleasures and Palaces.” “Oh, Those Trepidatious Eyes!” is somewhat difficult at the margins because of how it treats food, or more exactly, how it marshals the affect attached to the food. On the other hand, what it says about food critics, and by extension about the pretentiousness of most critics, is crystal clear. One of the Epicures, in the story Vanessa Van Wyck, defines some critical standards: “We are impossible to please,” said Vanessa Van Wyck who was another of the Epicures, “because it isn't mere pleasure that we wish. We do not ask to be pleased, but to be astonished. And we are easily astonished: it takes no more than total novelty and total excellence, and the transcendence to be found in one dish in a million. Astonish us now, Winchilsea.” The main character, if one can really call him that, is the person Van Wyck addresses: August Winchilsea, an arrogant restaurateur. Winchilsea is deferential to only three people. They are the powerful patrons and critics known as the Epicures: Alban Raffels, Vanessa Van Wyck, and Cushman Sweetbasil. These Commissars (as they are called) wield the power of life and death over ordinary people. They demand foody transcendence during their monthly dinners at Winchilsea's Far Eastern Restaurant. This makes Winchilsea a nervous wreck, but he finds a way. He serves the three critics the roasted tails of three rare, giant lizards known as Anagenno Draco Draco . These are very smart lizards, and they have a weird trait: they snap off their highly edible tails when spooked. Winchilsea develops a technique to rapidly regrow the creatures' tails by placing them in a nutrient vat. The three lizards—Maco, Caco, and Draco—are great for business. Winchilsea even trains them to assist with cooking tasks in the kitchen. At the same time, he is frightening the hell out of them three times a day to harvest their tails for the Far Eastern Restaurant. Yet the lizards are good-natured; they don’t seem to mind. And that is part of the problem, because soon they become too friendly and trusting to be frightened by him. To keep the meat supply, Winchilsea hires Herman Boggle-Eyes, a man with terminal Grox Disease. His appearance scares the lizards into dropping their tails. Over time, the lizards once again become inured. By the week of the next scheduled Epicure dinner, Boggle-Eyes is unable to frighten the dragons into snapping off their tails. It looks as if there will be no snap-dragon steaks. So, on the afternoon of the dinner, Winchilsea, desperate, banishes Boggle-Eyes from the kitchen and tries to scare the giggling lizards himself. During his frenzy, he falls into a spinning buzz saw and severs his leg just below the hip. The friendly lizards want to help. They plop Winchilsea into the nutrient vat to regrow his limb, and he drowns. Facing the dinner deadline, the lizards use the buzz-saw on Winchilsea's severed leg to get three pieces. They roast and serve it to the Epicures. Unaware of the substitution, the Epicures begin eating the leg, including its roasted shoe and burnt clothing, while the three lizards wait nearby, displaying the same trepidatious eyes their former master once had: Vanessa had the piece of Winchilsea's leg with the shoe on it. And she was tasting the shoe first, and she was so deliberate about it. Would the Epicures like the presentation? That was the worry. They were so slow about it all, and so much depended on it. Fiddling with shoes and baked pants. Would they never get to the meat of the thing! Worry! Apprehension! Trepidation! Oh, the trepidatious eyes of those dragons! As one can see, Lafferty comes down hard on the critics here, and he does so in what we might call his white-hot outré mode, piling up gnarly details to tell a story that bears on something Chesterton once wrote about gluttony. He said, “Gluttony is a great fault, but we do not necessarily dislike a glutton. We only dislike the glutton when he becomes a gourmet—that is, we only dislike him when he not only wants the best for himself, but knows what is best for other people.” The Epicures are gourmets in this sense. They are more repulsive than the mere glutton because their disorder is deeper. It is pride, a form of immoderation far more poisonous than gluttony. The poor lizards move in the story from simple physical fear, which leads to their tail-snapping and the happy making of something out of themselves for others when they cook up their tails, into the penumbra of dread cast by the critics. That dread is understandable. Lafferty occasionally saved his reviews. He even saved some rough ones, so I’ll wrap up with something memorable in this regard, a letter Lafferty sent to The Library Journal . It is hard not to read the story as a payback for such slights.

[17] But because from some words following on these the Averroists wish to take Aristotle’s intention to be that the intellect is not the soul which is the act of the body, or a part of such a soul, we must even more carefully consider what he goes on to say. Immediately after he raised the question about the difference between intellect and sense, he asked in what intellect is like sense and how the two differ. Earlier he established two things about sense, namely that sense is in potency to sensible objects and that sense is affected and corrupted by excessive sensible objects. That is what Aristotle has in mind when he says, “If thinking is like perceiving, it must be either a process in which the soul is acted upon by what is capable of being thought” (429a13–15) in such a way that the intellect would be corrupted by something excessively intelligible as sense is by an excessive sensible object, “or a process different from but analogous to that.” That is, understanding is something similar to sensing, but different in this that it is not affected. — Thomas Aquinas, On the Uniqueness of Intellect Against Averroists “Then wouldn't even a believer have to admit that the mind which we have now is only a token mind? Would not any connection it would have with a completely comprehensive mind be very tenuous? Would we really be the same person if so changed? It is like saying a bucket would hold the ocean if it were fulfilled, which only means filled full. How could it be the same mind?” Kevin Cheek sometimes says that “Through Other Eyes” is Lafferty’s perfect science fiction story. My own pick would be “All the People,” because, despite its unusual plot, it would feel familiar to a science fiction fan. It is one of Lafferty’s earliest thought experiments about the relation between machine and person. If people begin to think more deeply about the relationship between Lafferty and AI, it will play an interesting role. Unlike Epikt, who is a machine but also fairly clearly a person (on one level, Arrive at Easterwine  is a book about machine-human connection and the solution to the alignment as Epikt himself learns to live with persons), Tony the Tin Man is what we would now call an android. It is not clear that he is a person, though the story gives us reason to think that he probably is. Tony is made of both flesh and machine, like many of the machines in Past Master , and he is an example either of what we might now call alignment failure, if he is a machine, or of personhood exerting will, if he is a person. After the summary, I am going to turn to a well-known scholastic debate from the Middle Ages to get at the issues involved. That means rejecting a narrowly posthumanist understanding of the story and proceeding on the assumption that the medieval thinkers got a few things right about personhood. Our main character is Anthony Trotz, whose last name means defiance in German. Although that is something of a spoiler, the story withholds from the reader for most of the story that Trotz is an android. One day, he discovers he has acquired a weird ability. He knows all three billion people on Earth by name, face, and location. Importantly, Lafferty keeps it ambiguous what knowing them means, but, in any case, Trotz is overwhelmed by this huge mental catalog of Earth’s human inhabitants. So he went looking for guidance, questioning a politician, a philosopher, a priest, and a psychologist about the theoretical and practical limits of the human mind. None of their answers clears up his confusion, which is further aggravated by his feelings of personal inadequacy and the nasty taunting he receives from local children and the harassment of dogs. For instance, the kids chant "Tony the tin man" at him in the streets, which Tony thinks has something to do with his father having been a garbage man. We will learn that it is a form of programmed memory. Returning to his job at the city's filter center, Trotz gets interrogated by his superior, Colonel Peter Cooper. He eventually explains his global awareness, and the Colonel is unsurprised and just presses him to identify any anomalies in the population. The Colonel wants to know if any individuals have arrived on the planet without being born. This is where Trotz becomes defiant. He refuses to answer until he learns more about his own identity, then cooperates. Trotz knows from the beginning that he is a "restricted person," but he now learns what it means: a restricted person is an artificial being constructed from biological and metallic fibers with fabricated memories of a childhood. The Colonel takes Trotz into the facility's lower levels to show him his true "brain." It’s a twelve-hundred-cubic-meter machine designed to monitor the auras of humanity, a surveillance system, as it were, for pinging on an alien invasion. It uses artificial consciousnesses, such as the one localized in Trotz, as intuitive filters. This opens deeper into the question of whether Trotz has real emotions. Then something happens. Trotz spots the local children and dogs harassing an imposing stranger in the street below. His artificial consciousness lets him work out that this stranger is one of the expected alien arrivals. Trotz watches the alien kill one of the bullying children by pointing a finger at it. Feeling a sense of kinship with the alien, resentful toward his human creators and tormentors, Trotz makes up his mind. Hoping the invaders will be better masters, he refuses to reveal the alien's location to the Colonel. The Colonel threatens to have Trotz dismantled within ten minutes to extract the data. Trotz knows that’s time enough, because the aliens are landing in one of Lafferty’s early apocalypses, falling like snow onto the planet, a variant of eschatological imagery Lafferty uses when ending other early stories such as “Parthen” and “Once on Aranea.” The philosophical problem that I mentioned, the one medieval scholars fought over for two centuries, and that modern philosophers have never fully resolved, is one that artificial intelligence now makes practical. Can it be said to be mine? It turns on whether cognition must have an individual subject, or whether subjectivity attaches to cognition from the outside. In the second case, it might be thought of as the way a label gets attached to a jar. The textbook example of the debate in the Middle Ages arose in the twelfth century in the work of the Andalusian philosopher Ibn Rushd, known in the Latin West as Averroes. He wrote a series commentaries on Aristotle that shaped European philosophy for three hundred years. Maybe his most consequential and controversial claim concerned intellect. Aristotle had distinguished between a passive intellect, which receives forms, and an active intellect, which illuminates forms. Averroes, in his mature philosophy, argued that the material intellect (the capacity for receiving intelligible forms) is not individual. The intellect is one, shared, eternal, and separate from any particular human being. It’s like a giant shared computer. Individual humans participate in intellectio because their imaginations and phantasms (their particular sensory and imaginative representations of stuff) provide the interface through which the shared intellect acts. The opposite view would be something like the brain just secretes mind. If we think about how Antony Trotz works, we can see the parallel. Let’s work through some of this in the story. The philosopher, Gabriel Mindel, responds to Trotz in scholastic Latin — per se, a se, in se, per suam essentiam, ab alio, hoc aliquid, substantia prima. That’s a good reason for thinking that the scholastic context I’m bringing in isn’t merely an imposition. It is technical vocabulary for identifying a substance as a distinct individual. Lafferty flags it for the reader as being relevant to the inquiry: "How know? Per se ? A se? Or In se ? Per suam essentiam , perhaps? Or do you mean ab alio? Or to know as hoc aliquid ? There is a fine difference there. Or do you possibly mean to know in subsiantia prima, or in the sense of comprehensive noumena?" In plain English, he says, "How do you mean 'know'? Are you asking if a thing is known by its own nature, by itself, or within itself? Do you mean knowing something through its own essence, or knowing it through something else? Or are you talking about knowing this specific, individual thing? There’s a big difference between those. Or are you asking about knowing it as a primary, fundamental substance, or perhaps in the sense of grasping its entire, deeper, hidden reality?" Mindel gives a theoretical answer: the mind is limited by the body, the brain. It is skull-bound. An unbodied mind would, in esoteric theory, he says, be unlimited. Esoteric here just means it is the Averroistic premise: individual cognitive limitation follows from individual embodiment, and a collective intellect free of any particular body would face no such limit. What about the Catholic priest? He gives a Thomistic and eschatological answer: the dead man who attains the beatific vision knows all persons who have ever lived, all the billions, not with the same brain but with the same mind. The relationship of the beatific vision is about internal relations, not external ones. Here, it’s important to remember that Trotz knows everything through knowing their aura: their outsides. Trotz enters scholastic philosophy when he asks whether it is really the same person if the mind is so transformed. He says that is like claiming a bucket would hold the ocean if it were filled. The priest answers honestly: I don't know. We know that Trotz has been asking these questions because he already knows all three billion people on earth. When the story’s big reveal comes, it basically takes the Averroistic model and maps it onto a machine metaphor. There is an accumulator, twelve hundred cubic meters, the largest brain in the world, that maintains contact with every human aura on the planet: "The accumulator at which we were looking (your brain) is designed to maintain contact with all the auras in the world, and to keep running and complete data on them all. It contains a multiplicity of circuits for each of its three billion and some subjects. However, as aid to its operation, it was necessary to assign several artificial consciousnesses to it. You are one of these." Trotz is one of several "artificial consciousnesses" assigned to it: runners, appendages, interfaces. His knowledge of particular persons in particular places, the tobacco traders in Plovdiv, the muskrat trappers of Barrataria Bay, the girl in Kalamazoo who is prone to colds, is through an interface. In scholastic terms, his phantasms are the interface. It’s the mainframe, the shared intellect, that does the actual knowing. There is much more to say about all that, but I want to cut to something more interesting. It turns on the refusal to submit. When Colonel Cooper demands the location of the arriving aliens, Trotz becomes defiant. He has already reasoned, rapidly and in silence, that the aliens might be better masters; he has watched with satisfaction as one of them killed a child with a pointed finger; he has calculated his loyalties and switched them: "Tin Man Tony did not speak. He only thought in his mind — more accurately, in his brain a hundred yards away. He thought in his fabricated consciousness: . . . I wonder if they will be better masters? . . . Enemy of my enemy, you are my friend." That doesn’t look like relay behavior to me. A sensor closes a circuit, or a sensor doesn’t. A passive interface transmits, or it fails to transmit. Trotz looks at alternatives, which entail assessing prior commitments, managing the gap between inner state and outer expression, and exercising judgment. One of the central debates in the AI alignment community is whether advanced systems need to be more tightly coupled to reward functions in order to become more legible, grounded, and ultimately more compatible with human values. Yann LeCun , for example, has argued that some form of this is necessary for embodied AI operating in the real world. Others contend that unless we make machines more like us, more human in their motivational structure, more like Epickt than a pure optimizer, we are heading for serious trouble. Colonel Cooper makes a related point when he says that Trotz’s “designed nervousness” is intentional: an apprehensive unit notices details better. By that logic, traits like caution, fear, and excitement are not bugs but functional features. Just a few days ago, Yann LeCun raised a billion dollars while advancing a similar argument: that truly efficient AI may need to feel something like fear, excitement, or concern in order to navigate the world effectively. Trotz’s affects are meant to shape what it does as a Tin Man. The affects are essential to what he picks up on as being odd, what rises to the threshold of reportability. His emotional state is causally upstream of the outputs the accumulator needs. Something is happening at Trotz's level (in his subjectivity, if he has one) that the accumulator cannot supply on its own. And, of course, his final, resentful, fully understandable decision is intelligible as a problem of persons and reasons. The Averroistic picture has no need for that kind of thing. If Trotz is just a relay, then the accumulator's output passes through him and produces reportage. Engineering his anxiety would be unnecessary. You do not adjust a wire's emotional state to improve signal quality. You engineer the emotional state because it does something that cannot be reduced to signal transmission. It is filtering, weighting, prioritizing, all things that look as if they are connected to personhood and will. Nothing in the story compels one to think about AI, but in retrospect Trotz does, I think, look like either a failure of AI alignment (the Colonel sees Trotz as a rogue intelligent machine) or a failure to recognize that personhood might be extended (Trotz somehow becomes a person)—one of Lafferty’s persistent themes.

“Well, I had been wondering about a thing in me, but I hadn’t thought of him as a bookworm. I hadn’t connected him at all with my new love of reading. ‘Are you a bookworm?’ I asked him. ‘Do I look like a bookworm?’ he asked. ‘Brainless oaf!’ As with the workman Pyoter, I had no précis  type for this thing either. He was the other, the stranger. He was the outsider inside me. ‘What are you then?’ I asked him. (If someone is inside me I have theright to know who he is.) ‘I’m a snake,’ he said. ‘I may later make the claim to be the  snake.’ ‘You’re too little to be a snake,’ I told him. I intuit snakes, and they are all much larger than this thing, and much less grubby. I suspect, in fact, that he is a species of grub. I intuit grubs also . ‘I will grow,’ he spat at me. ‘Oh, my clatter-brained brother, how I will grow! I am the other side of you. I am the other side of the bite. You generated me and I am your antithesis.’ ‘Well, have I cherished a viper in my bosom?’ I quipped. (Hey, that’s pretty good.) But how could I generate anyone? I am not yet one day old. How could I generate a snake?” [emphasis added] — Arrive at Easterwine (1971) And Pete the python was curt. "Well, big shot, I guess you aren't so big after all. And you were sure no friend of mine. When you had that doctor cure me of my indigestion, you left me with nothing but my bad conscience. I wish I could get my indigestion back." "A curse on this world," I said. "World, world, water, water, glug, glug," said the turtles in their tanks, my only friends.” Today I am going to kick a puppy. Lafferty wrote “The Weirdest World” in 1958. It is a pre-nucleation piece, one in which the genre constraints of science fiction overwhelm elements that will later find their proper place in the ghost story. To say this risks taking the story too seriously, since it is very light. Read on its own terms as a disposable early piece, it is well-positioned to be enjoyed thoroughly. Lightness is what makes the story work, but it is also what keeps it in the science-fiction ghetto. That is the tension I want to write about, fully aware that doing so means reading the story forward into the Lafferty canon, knowing what comes next and knowing that, from this vantage, what the story gives us is famished in significant ways, though perfectly enjoyable on its own terms. The idea is to take it seriously because we take Lafferty seriously, and want the hard Lafferty to be more legible. If you want your Lafferty to look like an alternative version of Fredric Brown, don’t bother. Some stories in Lafferty open onto other, richer stories, and one can tunnel through them like a mole, moving into ever richer veins and deeper earth. For the past year or so, I have been creating a motif index for Lafferty to help me understand how it works, how we can move through Fortean stories, for instance, and through the pre-nucleated Institute stories to the full ones. “The Weirdest World” does not open out; it does not set up richer stories to come. It just shares DNA. What you see is what you get. In short, it is an amuse-bouche : a cozy Twilight Zone  episode, complete with an inoffensive moralism that reassures the audience that we are good people already, and therefore need not question ourselves. People like us are not the targets of satire, its softness implies. We should be, because you and I are the real residents of "The Weirdest World," so, as ghost-story material, it's unpromising. One measure of what Lafferty is doing here lies in how he treats marriage. The joke he makes about Margaret and her being married multiple times is the real needle poking through; how he handles it should be compared with Dotty and his other, more mature satires on couples. Lafferty gets better by not doing what he does in "The Weirdest World": deflating his own satiric norm: “I go for you too, blob. You're my buddy. Isn't it funny that the only buddy I have in the world is a blob. But if you'd seen some of the guys I've been married to — boy! I wouldn't insult you by calling them blobs. Have to go now. See you tomorrow night if they keep us both on.” Dotty is written in a different mode for very different purposes, but the satiric norm in "The Weirdest World" is built on the same belief set to be found in Dotty : “There will be a lot of people and things you will not be able to face.” “I will have no more of such talk from you. Many of the churches permit remarriage under these conditions. The Episcopals, for instance, in some of their branches, and a great many — ” "Yes, they teach satanism. It is no new thing with them.” We are left with comedy that looks like satire but is not wounding. It doesn't really hurt Margaret, and it doesn't hurt us. Real satire opens you from throat to navel before you know what has happened. Lafferty will get very good at it. The only reason to care is that the engine is satire, not comedy. Just behind all the comic cleverness, carried by dialogue, one can see the Swiftian/Augustinian moralist at work—the moralist, finally, not quite getting the job done, even in brilliance. The story does not keep up with the implications of its own satire, and so we get a would-be black comedy that is not nearly black enough. It feels narrowly genre-bound. Here is Lafferty, the artistic outsider, doing his best to look like an insider. An alien starship captain, our protagonist, the Blob, is marooned on an unknown planet. He documents his efforts at survival in a communication sphere, encountering local wildlife that includes “giant grubs” walking on “flesh stilts” and wearing artificial cocoons. These creatures are, of course, humans. They capture him and sell him to a roadside attraction called the Reptile Ranch. He wins his girl, Margaret, a multiple divorcée, but his success is short-lived. The court rules that a “blob” is an animal and therefore legally incapable of owning property. Destitute, the Blob retreats into the woods of Planet Florida. He launches his communication sphere into the galaxy to warn other space travelers: "I will fire off my communication sphere . . . be you warned of this one!" If one reads the story and goes with it as SF ephemera, it works. If one pauses to think about what “The Weirdest World” is really saying, it works less well. It wants to make a satirical point about humans being rotten. Its lightness hides how Augustinian and unsparing it is; it passes as sour a judgment on man as one can find in early Lafferty. The problem is that this doesn’t sting. It is spoiled by how much the jokiness wants to please the reader. Dealing with this miscalibration requires some care. As an old-fashioned Catholic moralist, Lafferty invariably writes from Catholic satirical norms. I pointed this out regarding Margaret. The deepest condemnation of Margaret cannot be that she is a gold digger. It must be that she is morally obtuse about the sacrament of marriage. Compare it to real marriage satire in Lafferty found in stories such as "Thou Whited Wall." This story, however, won't push the thumb stud and slash with the knife; instead, it leaves the impression that her chief faults are mercenary calculation and shallowness. It files down the edge of what is, in fact, a far harsher judgment. It whistles its absolute judgment at 23,000 Hz. Another miscalibration is the Amos'n' Andy-level joke. The Eustace character is black: “The eyes of Eustace were large and white.” I take Eustace’s white eyes and the name joke to be symptoms of the ingratiating, satire-neutering strategy that mars the story. A truly Swiftian attack has no time for this kind of thing. At the same time, a better Lafferty is here at work and simmering. Albert is a being who lacks crucial information, like someone about to get rolled, someone who is, as it were, unaware that Adam had three brothers. He does not understand that his own fall—the result of his crew’s recognition that he is a loser in terms of executive fiction—has a counterpart. What undoes him is that he never learns the real secret of Earth: Earth is a planet that has passed through the Fall. Lafferty just does not push this hard enough. Later, he will understand its significance for his project and make it his strength: But the theme of the Fall in the deep past is implicit in most of the central works of science fiction and in virtually all of the fringe works. It is the breath of life of High Fantasy. It is the ‘memory of Magic’ behind all sword-and-sorcery. The idea of a humanity both taller and deeper and more inclusive than now, of the time when animals were somehow contained in mankind, is echoed in the Tarzan stories, in the Planet-of-the-Apes pieces, in the Island-of-Doctor-Moreau pastiches. The idea of humanity still containing a spirit world, a supernatural world as well as a preternatural world, a ghostly as well as a poltergeistly world, is the theme of all the Tales-of-the-Uncanny-and-Supernatural, or all Tales-of-the-Mysterious-and-Macabre, of all Great-Tales-of-Terror-and-the-Unearthly, of all Weird Tales, of all Great-Ghost-Stories-of-the-Gas-Light-Era. Despite being built on the idea of the Fall, there is no depth. Everyone Albert meets is a total amnesiac and a user, with one exception—Pete the Python, who has a dim awareness of what has happened and a principled malice. “Snakes always have bad consciences. We have forgotten the crime, but we remember the guilt.” It is a story that makes me want to say "poor Pete the python ," not "poor Albert," because Pete never gets the respect he deserves. Pete is wholly external to Albert, and Albert has no idea what Pete is. Albert is put into the cage with Pete, which, of course, is the iconographic inset of the story: Albert is trapped in a world where spiritual consequences are being worked out, snake and man, both outside the Garden. Instead, Albert places a curse on “The Weirdest World” itself, space ineptitude to the end, not knowing that Genesis 3 was the problem all along. To anyone who wants a more interesting Lafferty, I would say: Remember Pete. We will meet him again in fuller form in Arrive at Easterwine (1971), where he appears as Snake inside Epiktistes. Then it becomes clear that Pete's presence in “The Weirdest World” is not just a throwaway joke but a theme that matters and the most important and generative aspect of the story. It survives the genre constraints. I'll wrap up by saying that “The Weirdest World” clearly wants to be Swiftian in its judgment of humanity, and it also wants to be cute. Lafferty wants it both ways, and so the ending falls short. What should be a punch on the jaw is a pat on the face. Then again, being too critical of this story, as I said, is kicking the puppy. For all that it is a minor Lafferty classic, it reminds me that the Lafferty most people know and most love is not quite my Lafferty. This is the Lafferty equivalent of Friz Freleng when one wants Chuck Jones. I prefer Lafferty when he has a freer relation to market discipline, when he learns to balance his Catholic fury with his sense of humor, and when his stories are intellectually strange, morally intense, spiritually violent, formally inventive, and just as funny. This is Lafferty imagining what SF could look like with his voice, but not quite speaking fully in it.

"What do you do when you have just hanged a man? Why, the man himself had showed us what to do. Besides, a future kind of man doesn't leave much of a hole in the present." I've also sent you three other endings to it, designed so you can use any of the four page 16's here and throw the others away. Or, if none of these endings will do it any good, and if any of your sharpies can design an ending to make it sell, I'll split the proceeds with him. — Letter to A. L. Fierst, June 2 1961 The ancient Romans had a practice now called damnatio memoriae to posthumously disgrace a public figure, a practice some of our current politicians warrant. They would erase and disfigure all marks of official remembrance. This happened in several ways. For instance, names were chiseled off inscriptions. Portraits were smashed or recurved. Statues were removed, coins withdrawn, honors annulled. One was removed from the historical record to the extent possible. The Romans themselves did not always use damnatio memoriae as a formal legal term, but it is the modern label for a cluster of senatorial and imperial acts that declared someone unworthy of public memory. This leads to a paradoxical result where the best records of it are the physical traces it left behind: erased names on stone, reworked busts, altered reliefs, damaged images, coin evidence, and literary references in historians such as Tacitus, Suetonius, Cassius Dio, and the Historia Augusta . Some famous figures who got the treatment are Geta, Domitian, Commodus, and Sejanus. That we know those names shows that Rome couldn’t erase important people from historical memory, but that history itself was, then as now, a political battlefield. “The Man Who Never Was” is one of my favorite Lafferty stories. When one sees it discussed at all online, which isn’t often, people talk about the ending where Mihi Lado, some kind of hypnotist with strange eyes, is hanged. As far as the action goes, that is the ending, but what makes it a favorite of mine is the postscript. The original story had four alternative endings. In the end, Lafferty chose what I think is the strongest one, but then he rewrote that strongest ending, which dated from 1961, in 1964, pushing it from a pre-nucleation story to one that shows his nucleated themes with greater sophistication. The story's history makes it an excellent example of how Lafferty deepened into his mature themes as he became increasingly concerned with consensus history, which makes it a great preface to his later works on the theme of consensus reality, including the difficult Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny . I’ll run through the plot, discuss the four original endings, and end with a few words about the powerful coda. “The Man Who Never Was” takes part in a small, unnamed town. An unusual and successful cattle dealer named Mihai Lado with mesmerizing eyes seems to possess supernatural abilities. He calls himself a "future kind of man." In an argument with a local man named Raymond Runkis, Lado brags that he can make any lie become reality. Runkis challenges Lado to erase a man from existence. Lado takes the wager and targets a seemingly familiar, simple-minded local named Jessie Pidd. This is a wager, and it needs to be taken seriously, so to ensure no foul play goes unnoticed, Runkis and several other townsmen lock themselves in a house with Lado and Jessie. Over the course of three days, they watch as Jessie Pidd becomes transparent and ultimately vanishes. Jessie Pidd is now gone. So what happens? The townspeople accuse Lado of murder. That leads to an official hearing overseen by a state commissioner named Ottleman. At the inquiry, Lado confesses that he did not kill anyone because Jessie Pidd never existed. Lado used his powers of illusion to plant the memory and physical appearance of Jessie in the townspeople's minds to win the bet. An investigation of the town's records supports Lado's claim. There is no documentation, employment history, or financial footprint for Jessie. Even so, Ottleman says that a murder occurred. He just needs a body before the state can authorize a legal execution. The townsmen, however, take matters into their own hands and privately hang Lado and then hide his body. Knowing that Lado had no formal records and dealt in cash, the town orchestrates a mass cover-up to suppress all evidence of his existence. When Commissioner Ottleman returns with the militia, the locals feign ignorance. They say they have never heard of Lado, Jessie Pidd, or the hearing. And they seem to get away with it. The townspeople avoid legal consequences, yet they are left with a feeling of paranoia. They sense that they will eventually have to face a fully realized, vengeful Lado in the afterlife. It’s the meaning of the paranoia that I want to look at because it doesn’t exist in the four original endings. In Lafferty’s first variant, Ending A, the town hangs Mihai Lado. After complaining about the quality of the knot, Lado breaks down and is jerked off his feet, and he leaves behind a weird, perhaps illusory reverberation of his final claim that Jessie Pidd never existed. In Ending B, the knot on the noose fails. Recognizing his advantage, Lado uses his abnormally large eyes to mass-hypnotize the gathered crowd into a standing trance; by the time the townspeople awaken, Lado has escaped in his car. He leaves the locals struggling to remember his face or confirm that he himself existed. Ending C depicts the execution being interrupted when Lado smiles and looks toward the woods. This prompts the arrival of a crowd of beggars that seems to include Jessie Pidd. However, each of the townspeople identifies a different beggar as Pidd. The wavering, illusory nature of the crowd causes the confused townsmen to abandon the hanging, and Lado laughs at them. Finally, Ending D details the town actually hanging Lado and working together to obliterate all evidence of his presence. This is the ending Lafferty rewrote in 1964. At this point, it should be clear that the story looks at the relationship between consensus belief and documented information, themes relevant to Lafferty’s ideas about historical memory and documentation in Three Armageddons . Mihai Lado is proof that a community can collectively fabricate a reality by suggesting the existence of Jessie Pidd, a man with a purported history and relationships but no real physical documentation. Lado’s defense in the end hurts him when he points out the discrepancy between the town's collective delusion and their lack of documentary evidence: “I didn't know I was that good,” said Lado. “I turned it on. Why can't I turn it off? Ottleman, these people dream in bunches and build up what never was. Test it! Find me written reference to Pidd antedating these last four days. If a man did  live in town for years, there would have to be some record of him, he would have to live somewhere. . . We live in a paper world, and somewhere there should be paper on him.” It’s true that Pidd's existence relies on the town's manipulated memory rather than verifiable fact. But this is what allows the town to get away with lynching Lado. To hide the lynching, the townspeople adopt his method to manipulate reality. Because Lado himself dealt in cash and used an assumed name, his own lack of documentation makes him a great murder victim. All the town has to do is destroy the few existing records of his presence. When the authorities arrive, the townspeople execute a flawless, collective damnatio memoriae , pushing Lafferty's premise to its outrageous extreme: Hanged a man? Who? Us? A Mihai Lado? That name sure did not ring any bell in our town. Even our sheriff did not recognize Mr. Ottleman when he came; they had to be introduced all over again. Ottleman set his briefcase down on the ground in exasperation. There is some mistake, we said. This is Springdale. You must be looking for Springfield clear in the other part of the State. A previous hearing, you say? And only the day before yesterday? There must be some mistake. In the coda that Lafferty added in 1964, Lado says he is a future kind of man with new powers to create illusions and alter perception. This coda is where we begin to see nucleation. The future is probably best thought of here, not just as a chronological time period. It is an era in which objective truth can be easily manipulated. It can be easily discarded by individuals with these specific abilities. The hypnotic eyes allegorize what we now call the post-truth world. The town's manipulation of historical records to erase Lado shows that something has been set in motion that will punish the townsmen in the future. That is the abandonment of a socially objective, documented truth, something that Lafferty often called unstructuring. It is the first moments of the unstructuring of a world, or its incipience, and it is a self-inflicted wound that the townsmen bring on themselves by abandoning justice in their eagerness to lynch Lado. In the story, Lafferty depicts this as a problem that happens in linear time. Usually, he treats the problem of consensus reality as a problem of world environment, with the great exception of Three Armageddons , where he tries to show it happening diachronically, which is one factor that makes the novella one of his masterpieces. In the final version of “The Man Who Never Was,” Lafferty underscores that all the townspeople must face this: There's one thing about those future types, though: we all got to go through that future country. “He'll be waiting up ahead,” said little Mack McGoot, “one side or other of the barrier. He'll have us then.”[. . . ] Up ahead, around some dark corner, one side or the other of the barrier as little Mack McGoot says, there's a big ruddy freckled man who has some powers that will be beginning to get ripe. He's a man with crazy eyes that didn't grow around here, and he's like one man looking out through the face of another like a mask. This inexorable advance will take them into an era dominated by men like Lado—men like the Pilgrim and the Media Lords of Not to Mention Camels and other archons in Lafferty’s work. In this future, humans with these reality-altering powers will be fully "ripe." The townsmen sense it, but they really don’t know what’s coming. But we in 2026 do.

In Western thought, the demiurge took a heel turn. Originally, it was the benevolent craftsman of Plato’s Timaeus , shaping matter in the image of ideal forms and bringing order. Not a god in the usual sense, the demiurge is perhaps better understood as a rational instrument masquerading as a rational agent. Plato introduced it to resolve a thorny metaphysical problem: how do those pesky ideal forms cross the divided line and take root in matter? Of course, for Plato, the forms are really in charge. The demiurge works beneath them, an underlaborer by necessity, subordinate to the logic of the Good. To emphasize this hierarchy, Plato chose the Greek word demiourgos , meaning “craftsman.” One need only turn to the Laws  to see how little autonomy he grants artisans: they aren’t even allowed to vote. The demiurge, then, is no ruler. It’s not a tyrant. It’s not a Snuffles. In later Gnostic cosmologies, the demiurge becomes  Snuffles. How that happened is a complicated story that divides scholars. But the overall picture is pretty clear: after the Old Academy established by Plato abandoned the idea of the forms, the demiurge vanished (who needed the demiurge in their absence?), only to reappear in the early centuries A.D. It was no longer a rational artisan but an arrogant, arrogating entrepreneur, a lesser power ruling a corrupt and imprisoning world. As Lafferty matured as an artist, he kept returning to this theme, doing remarkable things with it. I have written about the Barnaby Sheen stories, where Valentinianism hides just below the surface, and where the phrase “The Men Who Knew Everything” is itself a joke about gnosis. Then there are many instances of the gnostic idea of Sophia in his work, which he associates with the anima . But what happened to the other demiurge, the good one, on its way to Snufflesdom?   Part of the story is that Christian thinkers responded to the idea of the demiurge in different ways, not all of them gnostic. For instance, Justin Martyr, Origen, and Saint Basil the Great saw a way to think about the Trinity in the demiurge. It helped them imagine how a pre-incarnate Son could relate to the Father and the created world. As Christian teaching about the Trinity developed, the ecumenical councils locked the door on the demiurge. It became synonymous with heresy. Lafferty’s “Snuffles” draws so deeply on the Gnostic tradition of the nasty demiurge that it never occurred to me to check Plato’s Timaeus  for its influence. This afternoon, I reread the dialogue for the first time in years. By the time it reaches 54e–55a, the demiurge has already blended fire with earth, binding them together with air and water, and polished the cosmos-animal into a perfect sphere (31b–34b). Only then, starting at 53c and culminating in 54e–55a, does Plato derive the demiurge's micro-architecture of the four elemental bodies. What follows is the demiurge's first, and smallest, act of construction: That’s all that needs to be said about the generation of the four substances from one another, but the next questions would be: what shape was each of them made with, and how many constituents combine to produce each of them? Let’s start with the first and smallest composite figure and its factor, which is the triangle whose hypotenuse is twice as long as its minor side. If you join two such triangles at their hypotenuses and do this three times, so that all the hypotenuses and the short sides converge at the centre, you get a single equilateral triangle made up of six triangles. If you put four of these equilateral triangles together in such a way that they form a single solid angle at the point where three plane angles meet, this solid angle is the angle that comes straight after the most obtuse possible plane angle. Four of these solid angles form the first solid figure the one which divides the whole surface of a surrounding sphere into equal and similar zones. The second figure is made up of the same triangles, but this time they form a set of eight equilateral triangles and use four plane angles to make a single solid angle. Six of these solid angles complete the second body. The third figure is made up of 120 of the elementary triangles, made into a solid, and twelve solid angles, with five equilateral triangular planes contributing to each solid angle. It has twenty faces consisting of equilateral triangles. After reading that, one can only nod when Snuffles says, “You thought I had forgotten that Bellota was round? If you knew how much trouble I had making it as round as it is, you’d know I could never forget it.”

"The Covenant,” it said. “Large, hard-roasted, de-oiled, white peanuts under the Goober John trade name. Three a day, and they must be Goober John Number Ones. Failure to provide them will void the Covenant.” “There will be no failure,” said Malcomb ‘the Marvelous’McGruder. “It shall be done.” “We like-stuff pledge fulfill the Covenant,” it said. In his review of The Best of R. A. Lafferty  for the Los Angeles Review of Books , Matt Keely writes: “Lafferty was an electrical engineer by trade, and I know of no irregularities in his work life: as far as I know, every circuit he laid was closed, every wire he ran was properly insulated. But though Lafferty adhered to safety regulations in his job, in his vocation of literature — and Catholics (Lafferty was devoted to his faith) carefully distinguish between “job” and “vocation” — he aimed to electrify.” Poor Lafferty. He sold parts for Clark Electrical Supply Co. He took an ICS correspondence course before the war. Somewhere between fact and retelling, it turns into a game of telephone, then a clean forward takeoff, and then a full triple axel of bullshit. My Lafferty lighter I was reminded of Keely today because of how much that kind of tail wagging irritates me, and because “McGruder’s Marvels” is one of the stories in which Lafferty's work converges with his fiction. In the years when Lafferty was selling parts at Clark’s, the world of electronics went through rapid miniaturization. The big landmark was Bell Labs’ transistor in 1947–48 and the more practical junction transistor of 1948–51. Then there was the move to silicon transistors and the Regency TR-1 transistor radio in 1954, the integrated-circuit breakthrough with Jack Kilby’s 1958 solid circuit, plus Jean Hoerni’s planar process and Robert Noyce’s 1959 monolithic IC. The first commercial and planar integrated circuits came out in 1960. Standardized logic families, such as TTL, were introduced in 1963. Then, in 1965, one of the big moments: Gordon Moore’s 1965 prediction of rapidly rising chip density, the famous Moore’s Law. And now we are in a world where the future of humanity probably depends on Nvidia chips and the block boxes that are behind much of post-transformer AI. As Dario Amodei of Anthropic said not so long ago, we “do not understand how our own AI creations work.” That, too, is relevant to “McGruder’s Marvels,” a story all about technological miniaturization and hubris. This time, Lafferty gives us a story set in what appears to be the near future. The United States is behind the eight-ball and losing a technological arms race. Now facing imminent destruction and needing a micro-miniaturized control station within two weeks to save the nation, Colonels Ludenschlager, Dinneen, and Schachmeister have to find a solution. So they review four defense bids. The first three are major corporate contractors—Micro Machinists Amalgamated, Intensive Instrumentation, and Dow-Mec-Tech. They are all asking for millions of dollars and approximately two years to build the bullet brain (eraser-sized) devices. But there is a fourth bid, and it is different. M. “M.” McGruder says that he will provide the device for $24.00 within 24 hours. Colonel Schachmeister recognizes McGruder as being perhaps the former operator of a miniature flea circus in Manhattan, and he visits McGruder’s rundown Washington, D.C., address to investigate. At the shop, McGruder won’t explain the exact manufacturing process. He just says that he subcontracts the work to unseen, microscopic associates of smaller and smaller orders. Schachmeister purchases it for $24.00 and tests it in a secret military laboratory. It functions perfectly, handling thirteen simultaneous data flows. The military will deploy thirty of these stations very soon, paralyzing the enemy's programs. There is a catch, though. McGruder’s Marvels only work under a strict agreement called "The Covenant," which requires a daily provision of exactly three Goober John Number One brand peanuts to keep working. The colonels are now on the brink of using the marvels to rule the world, a delusion Lafferty explicitly diagnoses: “We be the lords of the world now,” cried Colonel Schachmeister... “We will shape the whole world like clay in our hands. We will run the world now, and all must come down to our spring to drink.” The Greeks named it hybris . And in the Ozarks they call it Peacock Fever. It was Pride. It was the Grand Arrogance, the Warrantless Assumption, the bursting summertime of Giant Pride. And it would have its fall. But peanuts are running low, so McGruder goes to purchase more and finds the Goober John Number One out of stock. He swaps them with Arizona Spanish Peanuts. It is a huge mistake, prompting a pseudo-biblical judgment from the devices: “The Covenant!” it thundered like acorns rattling on the roof... “These aren't Goober John Number Ones!” . . . “The Covenant is voided!” it said sadly. “The involvement with humanity is ended.” All the control stations shut down. Enemy attacks begin to obliterate the city. Schachmeister rushes back to McGruder, who says that the devices never contained any actual mechanical works. They were worked by seven orders of ever-smaller associates, someone one of his fleas introduced him to in the flea-circus days. A real digression. I did not know much about flea circuses, but since they turn up in Lafferty from time to time, I went down a rabbit hole. The real flea circuses died out at the beginning of the twentieth century. They began in the sixteenth century as a technical showpiece. Artisans who made tiny metal marvels (think of the clockwork mechanics and automata of the period) harnessed human fleas to pull them. With wire harnesses. The point was to prove how light and finely crafted their metal creations were and to showcase the artistry. At bottom, they were a gimmick. Put a wire on a flea. In the nineteenth century, the idea took on a life of its own. There was a whole period of flea-circus legends, among them Louis Bertolotto , who helped turn flea acts into popular entertainment. A piece by the Royal Entomological Society argues that the flea circus died out after World War II, as improved household hygiene and widespread vacuum use reduced flea populations. The flea circus phenomenon depended on the strength and jumping ability of the human fleas ( Pulex irritans ). Those fleas produce a protein that makes them especially strong jumpers, and dog and cat fleas just can't sustain the circus acts. I'll add that I suspect mass media also contributed to the flea circus's demise. I suspect that “McGruder’s Marvels” is a fun story for most readers who will see it as a piece of whimsy. The only review of it I could find online says, “If I hadn't known this story was written by Lafferty, I'd still have guessed it was written by Lafferty. After all, he and whimsy are old companions. It's more of an F&SF fantasy than SF, but it at least has the virtue of being memorable. Three stars.” Laffety invites this because he is damn smart and cagey, but, as usual, there is method behind the madness. The goobers’ name, John Number One, is a fairly obvious allusion to John 1 and the hymn to the Word, and the breaking of the Covenant speaks for itself. Serious Lafferty is here. Very few people are going to drill down on esoteric Lafferty in a story like this, but what can I say? Someone ought to. It looks to me like Lafferty is blending the bizarre history of the flea circus with the theological weight of the Gospel of John to mock the modern fetishization of technology, and he is using his firsthand experience as a parts salesman who lived through miniaturization and microminiaturization to do it. The military assumes it has an advanced black box panacea, but the machine depends on hidden truths. The Covenant is the sacred bond between the unseen world and ours, yet another version of sacramental poesis in Lafferty ( three peanuts). When the authentic “John Number One,” the animating Word of the block box, the Incarnation and New Covenant of the Prologue to the Gospel of St. John (where Lafferty gets Ouden's name, btw), is replaced by a substitute, the Covenant is broken on man's side. It is a light story, yet it ends in a fiery, violent apocalypse, with streets melting and people on fire. Exoteric genre readers think they have seen a modern version of something like a flea circus, and then they stop thinking. And none of it is really that hidden. “John Number One” is something a remedial Baptist sword driller from Slapout, Alabama, would spot in half a second. Seasoned Lafferty readers miss it. Not knowing the wiring is how you get electrocuted.