Two Links.

Of interest to Reefs of Earth fans: https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/could-medieval-bards-kill-rats-with 

Of interest to Space Chantey fans: https://www.ulysses-31.com/

'The Four Exterior Monsters'

I just found this photocopied image in a stack of papers and figured I ought to share it, since I can't find it anywhere else online. I'm sharing here just to share, because the image deserves to be shared and preserved. I'm 95% certain that I got this from Sam Tomaino at LaffCon2. I don't remember the source or the artist. Hopefully someone will comment here with that information.

Last post to EoL

(re-posted here because I think that it gets deleted immediately with the deletion of my account--which FB holds hostage for 30 days instead of deleting immediately)

Thanks to everyone here in East of Laughter for the years of fun. It has been wonder-full to get to know so many of you, both here online, and especially face-to-face at LaffCon.

I hate to be the guy who does a public "I'll be leaving now" post, but that's what this is. I've found that publicly and privately discussing Lafferty (or anything else for that matter) *on Facebook* causes me more anxiety and trouble than it's worth. Many of you know that I've deleted accounts and changed names frequently on this account as a way of coping with what I consider the inherent strangeness of FB. I've been reluctant to delete this account and leave this community because it has been a source of much joy to me, even if it also causes (largely self-inflicted) pain.

David Cruces, you created an incredible monster. What a privilege to live and talk in its belly with you and so many others that I've grown to love. Truly, I love so many of you.

"Ah, goodbye, people, or whatever you are. Yes, I think 'goodbye' is the word."

"it's part of science fiction"

R.A. Lafferty, from "The Case of the Moth-Eaten Magician":

And another minus for SF is to be found in the apotheoses that are presented from time to time. Among the great bravura presentations that are somewhat controversial are the apotheoses. You like them or you like them not. I didn't like the apotheosis of the Roman Emperors that took place when I was around in my earlier manifestations; and I didn't like the apotheosis of this tedious pusher of fascism-for-boys (Oh, the twigs he's bent, the twigs he's bent!) which event took place in the Meuhlebach Hotel in Kansas City near the end of summer of 1976. This was in the main banquet hall, and it was as elaborate as it was stuffy. Perhaps it was appropriate that this master of fulsomeness and tedium should have a fulsome and tedious ceremony. But how were they able to draft such a crew to be fulsomeizers and tediumizers? I asked several of them about it later. “Oh, you have to go along with something like that,” they said, “it's part of science fiction.”

There were tributes and tributes and still more tributes, many hours of them. I slept and woke and slept and woke again and they were still going on. I remembered that at the apotheosis of Roman Emperors, the tributes went on all the time while the bulls were being caught and slaughtered and then roasted whole on giant spits, and that always took many hours until they were roasted through and through. So did this take many hours.
Most of the tribute-givers were arrant fools, but not all of them. Bob Tucker was up there. Alfred Bester was up there. How did they get such intelligent though roguish persons to take part in such concatenated and lock-step cheesiness? And the supreme tribute was to come after many hours of these lesser tributes. 

God Himself was to be involved in that supreme tribute, and the arrangers of the apotheosis believed, rightly or wrongly, that they had a commitment from God to play a part. Oh, a ceiling panel was to slide back at the climax of the ceremonies. The giant Hand of God was to come down through that opening, and the index finger was to touch this candidate for apotheosis. And then the Voice of God was to boom down through the aperture in the celing:
“This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased.” 

But it didn't happen quite that way. Wouldn't you know it, the panel in the ceiling of the main dining hall of the Muehlebach stuck. It rattled and rattled but it wouldn't slide open. There was a long and tiresome and uneasy moment but it still wouldn't slide open. So the Hand of God never did come down, and the Voice of God never did sound. 

This didn't really happen? Or it didn't really didn't happen? I tell you that more than half of the people in that dining hall were rolling their eyes up towards that ceiling and muttering “Oh God Oh God Oh God!” as the thing dragged on and on, and they were pale and twitchy and nauseated by the ecstasy of it all. And yet it ended up as ‘bad show’. 

This was probably the lowest moment in the entire history of science fiction, almost the lowest moment in anything. And yet the squalid apotheosis did take place, and now Heinlein is one of the Gods.

Documentary footage of The Apotheosis of Robert Heinlein:

Gardner Dozois introduces "Slow Tuesday Night"

From the anthology A Day in the Life, first published 1972, still available as an ebook via Baen (see links below).

“By 1990, we will have television.” SF has always been fond of statements like that. Most of them have been wrong—hardly anyone foresaw the incredible^- acceleration of our society, the cultural/technological/psychological explosion that wrenched us from Kitty Hawk to Copernicus in seventy years, that gave us credit cards and pollution and LSD, that shoved us into the mass nervous breakdown of the late sixties. As a result, only those stories that were the most radical and farfetched in their conception of life in 1970 bear even a conservative correlation to reality. Satire ages best—I’m sure to the horror of the satirists, who must watch their created absurdities and distortions creeping into the headlines and becoming mundane. Listen to a TV commercial, watch an X-rated movie, look out the window (remember windows?), step outside and discover that you can’t breathe the air. Notice how much your morning newspaper resembles The Marching Morons? Catch-22 is one of the most realistic war novels ever written. Ask any private who’s ever been caught in the gears.

One thing we can be fairly sure of: if we don’t blow up the world or strangle in our own excreta, the future will be more complex and strange than we suppose, maybe more strange than we can even imagine. R. A. Lafferty—a man possessed of one of the most daring, flexible and incisive imaginations in the world—here blips us through a slow Tuesday night with the speed of a computer data transfer. Read it and laugh, because it is very funny, and at the moment it is satire. If you’re still around forty years from now, do the existing societal equivalent of reading it again, and you may find yourself laughing out of the other side of your mouth (remember mouths?). It will probably be much too conservative.

G.D.

https://www.baen.com/Chapters/9781618249203/9781618249203.htm

https://www.amazon.com/Day-Life-Gardner-Dozois-ebook/dp/B00O8Y5BYE/

Harpo Marx and Albert the Alligator

I've been inspired by Bill Rogers' recent artwork. Not inspired to do all of the work needed for something great, but inspired enough to put up a brief poking, plodding blog post in the hopes that someone else will run with the idea and write the essay I want to read, but don't want to write.

Bill's art: https://www.flickr.com/photos/giveawayboy/36831469492/

"I found that there are more mysterious creatures inside of every person than there are persons in the world."

I'm no Greek scholar. Not even a Greek amateur. It's all Greek to me. But I am able to find my way around Greek "study tools" such as dictionaries and concordances.

Lafferty's "ktistec" is an obvious derivation of the greek verb "ktizó" (I'm going to be using transliterations instead of copying and pasting the actual Greek here). Specifically, Ktistec is from the noun "ktístēs": Creator. http://biblehub.com/greek/2936.htm

After his birth, Epikt the machine is immediately baptized in wine and named by Valery (one of Lafferty's greatest characters).

“Epiktistes!” Gregory crackled. “That can not be its name. That means the ‘creative one,’ and it is ourselves who are the creative ones. This thing will be a mere receptacle and reactor.”

In Greek as in English (following the Latin), there is a closeness in the language to describe two very distinct things. Ktistes is the creator. Ktistis is the creation. Lafferty very clearly uses the 'e'. Our favorite machine is indeed the created Creative One.

With this naming begins one of the key themes of Arrive at Easterwine, that of creating, creation, new creation, and creatureliness.

A search for "creat" in the digital text of Easterwine reveals that the root "creat" appears 54 times in the text. It's often Epikt referring to others as creatures. Epikt never forgets that he is a created being, a creature, and he relates to others as such. "Creature" stresses the created reality of each.

Also, from his beginning Epikt is given a fundamentally creative objective:

“It is necessary now that we state our purpose,” Gregory insisted (horrendous blasting and that urbane maniacal laughter at the front door again!), “that the mechanismus should become the paragon of group-man, I have said; and that it will attempt the next steps in man that man himself is incapable of taking. But this fine-honed machine (though you do seem a little rough yet, Epikt) must now be set to three primary tasks. These may be the types of all tasks and problems there are. The three tasks (and I will outline them as briefly as possible, no more than an hour to each) will be to establish or create—” “A Leader,” said Valery. “A Love,” said Aloysius. “And a Liaison,” said Cecil Corn.

Besides the creation talk, there is some related "generation" and "generating" talk throughout the book.

And probably the most obvious connection to all of this creation talk is that Lafferty begins Chapter 1 with the powerfully resonant phrase, "In the beginning," echoing the book of Genesis (and maybe perhaps also an echo of the Gospel of John's own echoing twist on Genesis; Lafferty does also play with the language and idea of Logos as well as the "central terminal" of Easterwine).

That's all I've got. I haven't actually re-read the book or put any work into this idea. I'm just rambling as usual. I'm hoping that maybe my rambling post will lead to new posts from Daniel and Kevin on anything. I know I came late to the blogging party. But I'm here insisting that the party is NOT over!! I've also been eagerly awaiting Andrew's next Archipelago post. Please, Andrew, come back to us! More Archipelago! Even better than hearing from any of those guys, maybe I'll convince someone else to take up the task of blogging about Lafferty. "Hey, if that idiot John can do it, I can do it better!" Yes, you can! Do it!

 I confess that I've been in a dry period of Lafferty reading myself. Besides re-reading a few of the essays a month or so ago, I haven't read any Lafferty since reading Not to Mention Camels (which is a very bad book. I shouldn't have used it). I've been reading Wolfe's Book of the New Sun (my first time tackling more than the first novel, which I read nearly 20 years ago) and the usualy stack of non-fiction (most notably for Lafferty-related thought, I'm re-reading Augustine's Confessions and see plenty of connection between Augustine's descriptions of the dis-integrated self and Lafferty's work). When I'm finished with that, I'm hoping to tackle either More Than Melchisidech or East of Laughter. There's an essay that's long been bubbling inside of me about the Argo trilogy and Lafferty's alcohol use and abuse, so I need to, you know, actually finish the trilogy(!) before I can re-read it and then finally start to intelligently comment on it. But I'm currently leaning towards a first read of East of Laughter. The recent passing of Robert Jenson had me re-reading this essay:
 https://www.firstthings.com/article/2010/03/how-the-world-lost-its-story. The same day had me searching Daniel's blog for something I half-remembered, that the Jenson essay had stirred in me:
 http://antsofgodarequeerfish.blogspot.com/2011/08/they-learned-that-quest-for-reality-is.html

They also learned that they themselves were outside of reality, that they had never touched it at even one point, but that sometimes they came close. They were imbrued, all through their happy suppertime and into the night hours, with an almost-happy philosophy. They hadn’t yet come to the centrality of the philosophy, but they found themselves more and more on the near fringes of it as they discussed and reveled and studied. They learned that a quest for reality is possible.’

Fool's Ranking

I've now read twelve Lafferty novels. (It's been a while since I counted, but I think that my short stories read count is up around 170--out of 220+ published!)

As deep as I am into Lafferty, I still feel like a newbie. So much to read. So much to learn.

Here's how I'd personally rank the novels if someone asked me today. The order would probably change by tomorrow.

1. Archipelago
2. Sindbad: The Thirteenth Voyage
3. My Heart Leaps Up
4. The Devil is Dead
5. Fourth Mansions
6. Not to Mention Camels
7. Annals of Klepsis
8. Serpent's Egg
9. Arrive at Easterwine
10. Past Master
11. The Reefs of Earth
12. Space Chantey

If someone wanted me to assign star or number ratings, that's easy. Each of these books is a perfect 10/10 or five stars out of five stars. I have not yet met a Lafferty novel which has disappointed me. They have confounded me, but never disappointed. There are some stories that I can take or leave, that I've definitely felt lukewarm towards, but I've never felt that way about any of the novels (except maybe Aurelia--sorry, Gregorio!--which I started and did not finish).

Eleven published novels left to go!:
Dotty
More Than Melchisidech
The Flame is Green
Half a Sky
The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeney
Where Have You Been, Sandaliotis?
Aurelia
East of Laughter
The Fall of Rome
Okla Hannali
The Elliptical Grave

So, by my count, that's 23 published novels? Right? Am I missing anything?

And then 14 unpublished novels? And six unpublished novel fragments?

I'm planning on reading Aurelia next, then I'm not sure. Maybe More Than Melchisidech and Dotty. It's possible that before this year is over, I'll get serious and write an essay on one specific aspect of the Argo Cycle, an idea that I've been rolling around in my head for a while. I need to read MTM and Dotty before I can feel good about starting this.

"You'll add to it yourself in your death straits, if there is any deformed originality in you."

I read the entirety of Not to Mention Camels over three days while on a family vacation this past weekend. It felt good to relax into a novel, especially one as thrillingly good as this one. I knew Camels only by its reputation as a "very bad, terrible book" and knew that DOJP was hesitant to fully love the novel. I think that Gaiman specifically mentions it as a failed novel in his Coode St episode. I also learned at this year's LaffCon that the book had been astoundingly popular in Spain when it was translated there, going through multiple print runs. (Weirdly, there's no entry for the Spanish edition on isfdb.)

I wrote the following the other day after reading the first four chapters.....


Anyone really love Not to Mention Camels? I think I do.

I'm four chapters in and really enjoying it. It's definitely strongly Laffertarian, but it's also giving me a strong PKD vibe with its immoral protagonist and unstable, uncertain realities. It's funny, but it's a much darker funny. Something about a highly capable male protagonist trying to exert his will over the world makes this novel feel more closely aligned with core sf than many of Lafferty's other texts. It almost feels like a subversion of the Campbellian/Heinleinian self-sufficient man myth.

Reading Camels jolted in me an awareness (I'd already known this but now thought it afresh) of how important community is to Lafferty's work.

In Space Chantey, Roadstrum is captain of an entire crew.

In Past Master, Thomas More joins a small band of misfits.

In Reefs of Earth, the Puca children are a family unit.

In Fourth Mansions, Freddy Foley is in constant contact with almost everyone else in the novel.

In Sindbad, there is, like in Past Master, a small band of weird heroes facing down swamp dragons.

In Serpent's Egg, there are the 12 children.

In Archipelago, there is the core group of friends.

In The Devil is Dead, Finnegan is central, but there are several women orbiting around him, and also the Devil and Mr. X.

Arrive at Easterwine features the Institute.

Annals of Klepsis is another ship's crew.

My Heart Leaps Up features dozens of kids.

Those are examples from the novels that I've read (excluding a few novels that I've dipped into but haven't read in their entirety).

Examples could be multiplied from the stories. (So too could exceptions.)

Multiplied is a good word. Lafferty dealt in multiples and abundance was a regular thing. Including a multiplication of and abundance of characters.

In Not to Mention Camels, though, so far there is no such community. There is the force of will of a man (?) Pilgrim and those who bend to his will. His antagonist, Evenhand, is surrounded by a company of eight, but even then, the are described as extensions of himself.

The Case of the Moth-Eaten Magician was published in 1981, five years after the publication of Not to Mention Camels. I believe that the opening of Moth-Eaten Magician gives us one clue as to what Lafferty was up to in this hellish novel. Contra Sartre, hell is not other people. It is a complete disregard for anything Other, anything outside of oneself.

Long excerpt from the beginning of Magician:

Well, following the same cleavage, there are two kinds of almost everything. There are two kinds of people in the world, and that's the difficulty.

There are persons with a strong interest and affection for themselves and themselves alone.

There are persons with a strong interest and affection for the world about them, and for its furniture and people.

So far as I know, these are the only two sorts of people there are, and the difference between these two sorts is very deep. It would seem that the persons of the first sort, having no real interest in other persons at all, would not be interesting to those other persons either; but this isn't always the case. These persons of the first sort are often able to transmit their intoxication with themselves to others.

 

“Everybody look at me,

I'm way and out the best there be,”

 

— the persons proclaim, and often groups and clots of folks, loitering and guesting clusters or clumps of people will give them the echo “Amen, Amen, you sure are!” This is mostly inexplicable to me. Many persons of the first sort do become cult figures and have followings. But it seems as though a universe with only one person in it, and a group of shadows, is too small.

These classifications have nothing to do with the artificial categories of introvert and extrovert. A person of the first sort will see and admire himself both from within and from without. He will see himself from a series of exterior vistas set like spotlights to highlight him.

And a person of the second sort will see the world objectively in whatever manner persons do see exterior objects and complexes. And he will also see it in a subjective and personalized way. No one can see things without putting his own personal signature on his seeing.

take it for gift, take it for granted; it was for his openness that a number of amazing worlds happened to him and can happen to you.

Quote:

Ingolf Dalferth thinks we are Creatures of Possibility. By that, he means that “we are creatures in the making whose actual becoming depends on possibilities beyond our control that occur in our lives as opportunities and chances that we can neglect and miss or take up and use” (ix). We are free to choose and act, and we can determine “the mode of our choosing and the way of our acting in moral terms.” Yet this freedom “depends on conditions that are beyond our control: we can choose and act and determine ourselves only against the backdrop of a basic passivity that characterizes our life and cannot be replaced or undone by anything we can do” (x).
This is a fundamental reality of human life: “Most of what we are we do not owe to ourselves.” Our existence (Dasein), our particular way of existence (Sosein), and our truthful existence (Wahrsein) are all “molded by passivity”: “There is so much that happens to us and so little that we make happen. Before I can act as a self, I must become a self, and while I cannot be a self without acting, I cannot become a self by acting.” Before we can even us the nominative “I,” we first experience the dative and the accusative—we are objects and recipients. In short, “A primal passivity precedes all our activity. Before we can give, we must be a given, and before we can act, we must be an actuality” (xi-xii).
Peter Leithart on Ingolf Dalferth's Creatures of Possibility

Quote:

"All his life, people would be giving valuable things to Fred Foley unasked: gifts, powers, lives, worlds, secrets."
-R.A. Lafferty, Fourth Mansions

Quote:

"Simply, Freddy will continue to evolve as the four exterior forces give him outright gifts and accidental benefits. His role in life seems to be as recipient and beneficiary of the other forces in the world. This lets him become the first truly integrated person by the end of the novel, able to incorporate the characteristics of all the monsters."
-Kevin Cheek, from an essay to be published in the LaffCon2 booklet (yes, this is a teaser!)

Quote:

“It may be that you will like Fourth Mansions and you may find yourself a little bit like Freddy Foley in it, in youth and openness at least. It was for his openness that a number of amazing worlds happened to him and can happen to you. I have picked out four human aspects or movements in this, out of many, which are deformities and monstrosities in isolation, but which should be strengths when integrated in the person and group personality. At least that is what I have tried to do. Even the Patricks must have their place in the integrated personality and they must have their place in you.”
—R. A. Lafferty, Letter to Guy Lillian, Challenger #16 (1969)

In the funny paper.

"There was the invisible dog of the patrick Bertigrew Bagley, who was more ape than dog, and who could sometimes be seen if one knew how to look. Foley saw him now, and the plappergeist winked solemnly at him. Freddy knew who he was then. He was the island-ape who used to be in the Katzenjammer Kids in the funny paper. But all grotesque funny paper characters have independent and exterior existence, unknown usually to their drawers. It was good to have the dog, the ape, the polter-plappergeist on your side. He was smarter and more mischievous than other dogs or apes, and he could kill effectively." 

-from Fourth Mansions

Over 100 years later, it's still hard to find Katzenjammer Kids comics.

Some future fan/scholar will have to do the hard work of digging through thousands of microfiche newspapers. What's microfiche? What's a newspaper?

I've become increasingly convinced (after reading My Heart Leaps Up) that early 20th century popular culture (nostalgic trash) is one major key to one major Lafferty door. Anyone annotating a Lafferty book better brush up on newspaper strips and big bands. A quick search reveals only one candidate for a Katzenjammer island ape, and this is only preserved in a Turkish translation!

http://kayaozkaracalar.blogspot.com/2011/05/turkish-debut-of-katzenjammer-kids-1937.html

This may or may not be the right ape. Perhaps future Lafferty scholars (or Katzenjammer scholars) will someday make the identification.

I've often thought that there's an interesting essay to be written by someone willing to wrestle with all of Laff's references to comics, uses of comics in his stories, and sometimes comics-logic. Alas, I don't think that I'll ever write that essay, but I'll be first in line to read it if someone else takes up the challenge!

Lafferty blurbs Wolfe.

From Endangered Species:

From Pandora by Holly Hollander:

Pangnosticism

From "The Effigy Histories:"

"...for he had the various shapes and attitudes of a person who knows everything. Those shapes and attitudes are intuitive, and they are always to be recognized. And they cannot be faked.
 And Karl Effigy did not know everything, because all his pleasant Histories were nonsense, and so were his pleasant explanations of them."

From "The Casey Machine"

""In times before this, several other organizations of illuminated persons have known everything. They knew everything, before their own deaths, by making a Particular Judgment in their own lives. But we become masters of our own judgment in a way the earlier ones could not, because we live in an age of electronic amplification and switching and data control. We are able to project it all, and to repeat it. Yes, and we are able to sell it."

-----

Besides  “The Men Who Knew Everything," there are others in Lafferty's fictions who knew everything. Diogenes Pontifex, that elegant man not quite of the Institute, is said to have been a man who knew everything. The other elegantly indecent non-member of the Institute, Audifax O’Hanlon, is described as “quite ordinary except for one double-edged gift: he knew everything that had been, and everything that would be.”

Oread Funnyfingers went to school only for seemliness. She already knew everything. Charley Longbank, friend of collector Leo Nation, is also offhandedly described as one who knew everything.

(See “Hole on the Corner,” Arrive at Easterwine, “Funnyfingers,” “All Pieces of the River Shore.”)

In Reefs of Earth, we read: “As a high master of the Bagarthatch, John Pandemonium was supposed to be a pangnostic, one who knew everything.”

In Archipelago, we are introduced to the Dirty Five “as mythology knows them.” We are told that, “Between them they knew everything, had thought all thoughts, had done all things, or at least had them in mind to do.”

Melchisedech Duffey “knew everything, of course, but that was no special achievement. A lot of them knew everything.”

Hans, one of the Five, “knew everything before everyone else.” Hans also studied under Professor Kirol von Weinsberg, “the last man who knew everything.”

“There can never be another one, as knowledge has so constantly multiplied that it is no longer possible for one man to know it all. It is necessary that there be a new sort of man who is satisfied with only knowing a part of it. It is necessary, but the Professor wouldn't be so satisfied, and neither would Hans.”

In The Devil is Dead, “Papa Devil knew everything.”

There are probably others that I've missed and many further connections to be made.

And as is evidenced in "The Effigy Histories" and "The Casey Machine" (part of More than Melchisedech, the whole of which I haven't tackled yet) excerpts above, there are artificial (and vile) ways of knowing everything and/or ways to know everything but also have it all completely wrong.

Links Links Links

Posting this here to remind myself that I have a Lafferty blog.

Discoveries this morning...

---Among Lafferty's surviving personal papers:
"Photo-reproduction of an illustration featuring goats and ducks, and a helicopter flying upside down."
http://www.lib.utulsa.edu/speccoll/collections/lafferty/series3.htm

---Michael Dirda was on the World Fantasy Committee that awarded Lafferty his Lifetime Achievement Award.
"I'm a great fan of R.A. Lafferty -- in fact, I was on the World Fantasy Awards committee that got him a Lifetime Achievement Award."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2007/04/05/DI2007040500845.html

---Jo Walton's L shelves begin with Lafferty.
"You know how you sometimes get medication that says “do not exceed 4 tablets in 24 hours”? Lafferty is like that for me. The best way to read him is to keep a collection on your bedside table and read one story every night."
http://www.tor.com/2010/06/27/ok-where-do-i-start-with-that-l/

---A man named George Barlow wrote a significant intro to Laff in '73. FoL should translate and publish this.
"Ce qui m'a toujours gêné chez Eliot, ce qui me gêne aussi chez Lafferty, c'est la conjonction d'une extrême érudition et d'une extrême désinvolture : chez l'un comme chez l'autre, la plus grande richesse dans le plus grand désordre exige du lecteur des efforts d'autant plus difficiles que ni la raison (claire perception d'un enchaînement logique) ni la sensibilité (identification à des tribulations humaines) ne sont mobilisés pour les soutenir."
http://www.noosfere.org/icarus/articles/article.asp?numarticle=172

---More French Lafferty stuff here:
http://www.noosfere.org/icarus/livres/auteur.asp?NumAuteur=311

---Paul Cook gives Lafferty some love in a sf history lecture:
"I would equate in spirit many of R.A. Lafferty's short stories with those of magical realist Jorge Luis Borges. They are that good. Lafferty, however, has more humor than does Borges."
http://www.public.asu.edu/~paulcook/Fifth%20Lecture.htm

---Lafferty gets some love from The Believer.
"2015 saw a spate of reissues (including these deluxe editions) of the wonderfully odd stories of long out-of-print wunderkind R.A. Lafferty. Another writer whose work has been classed as science fiction but whose true metier was ideas stretched to their greatest possibilities, Lafferty wrote in imitable laser-blasts of prose equal parts playful and transfixing. These collections are an affirmation for an enduring cult of devotees for whom Lafferty is the American equal of a Borges or Cortázar."
http://logger.believermag.com/post/137218978340/our-favorite-books-2015

---Anthony has been posting wonderful "illustration notes" on his blog. Start with this one, then read through them all.
"Since I've started making art again, everything I have created has been for Feast of Laughter."
http://arr-illustrator.blogspot.com/2016/04/santuario-de-chimayo.html

---Not Laff-related, but I'll sign off with this great Percy quote:
"Who says I despair? That is to say, I would reverse Kierkegaard's aphorism that the worst despair is that despair which is unconscious of itself as despair, and instead say that the best despair and the beginning of hope is to be conscious of despair in the very air we breathe, and to look around for something better. I like to eat crawfish and drink beer. That's despair?"
http://www.doubletakemagazine.org/int/html/percy/

King's Cross Station by G.K. Chesterton

This circled cosmos whereof man is god
   Has suns and stars of green and gold and red,
And cloudlands of great smoke, that range o'er range
  Far floating, hide its iron heavens o'erhead.

 God! shall we ever honour what we are, 
  And see one moment ere the age expire,
The vision of man shouting and erect, 
  Whirled by the shrieking steeds of flood and fire?

Or must Fate act the same grey farce again, 
  And wait, till one, amid Time's wrecks and scars,
Speaks to a ruin here, 'What poet-race
  Shot such cyclopean arches at the stars?'

Algis Budrys, F&SF November 1983

........
How can a structure of fiction limn reality more clearly than reality does? Ah, well, that's the magic in it, you see...

  R.A. Lafferty could explain it to you, and probably has. Raphael Aloysius Lafferty has thought more, said more, and written down more intricate thoughts than anyone else in SF -- possibly than anyone else in SF ever, past or future -- and his career alone would serve to terminally blur all the nice distinctions between sorts of literature and of genres within those sorts. There is no question but that the man is an SF writer -- all that he does all day, apparently, is to speculate, although the front of his mind may at times rest -- and equally no question that you could go mad attempting to define what kind of SF he writes.

  Well, scholars, your task has been made even more piquant, and certainly no easier, by the appearance of Four Stories, one of the most chapped chap-books it has ever been my pleasure to behold.

  Available at $2.00 postpaid from Chris Drumm, P.O. Box 445, Polk City, IA 50226, these are four stories copyright 1983 by Lafferty and hitherto unpublished. "The Last Astronomer" is relatively straightforward; it's about the life and the last day of High Rider Charles-Wain, the last astronomer to survive the shattering discoveries that the universe is really quite small, interstellar distances are ludicrously short, and that Terrestrial "astronomy fiction" has long been the favorite humorous reading matter on Mars.

  "In the Turpentine Trees," however, begins to take on matters of some weight. It raises the questions of how a person might go about becoming God, how often it might have been done, and why it's not done more often. Furthermore, it provides answers.

  "Bird-Master" either is or is not a recasting of certain American Indian legends, reflecting another interest of Lafferty's. Or rather reflecting that aspect of Lafferty's one interest, which is everything. It's fine, and besides being risible is haunting. The story which is in some ways the slightest of the four, but will be discussed more often because it has an easily encapsulated idea, is "Faith Sufficient," about a fake faith-healer who exposes faith-healing fakes, but at a crucial moment depends on the intervention of a mouse who can move mountains. (Say that line aloud three times quickly, and you will do to your tongue what Lafferty does to the mind.)

  There you are. You can't do a study of Lafferty without being conversant with this material; I would judge that "In the Turpentine Trees," at least in some ways crosses beyond the borders of what commercial SF media finds publishable, and so is an indispensible benchmark of just how much craziness we will indulge, and of what kind. So send Drumm the $2.00. I don't know how he got hold of this material, but I'm sure it's legit. Also available is his R.A. Lafferty Checklist, at $1.25: 32 pages, with notes.

  The pages, if other Drumm publications are any criterion, are covered with very small type, achieved by photo-reducing typewritten copy. It comes out 16 characters to the inch -- 25% smaller than elite. Four Stories has over 37 pages, each page 4 1/2" x 7', with very tight margins. The whole thing looks like something produced in a basement on 8 1/2" x 11" paper ingeniously folded, sewn (literally), and then trimmed by tearing the edges against a steel rule. The checklists -- there are four others -- are equally marvelous to behold. (The Hal Clement @ 50c, is eight pages on cardstock; the Mack Reynolds and Thomas M. Disch, at $1.00 each, are 24 pages; the Algis Budrys, at 75c, is 16 pages and even includes my crime fiction, plus running corrections of errata.) All this apparently began with book dealer Drumm's publication of a catalog ($1.00, refundable with purchase) and has since gotten out of hand.

  It seems somehow inevitable that the Laffertys of this world find the Drumms and the Drumms find the Budryses. But if we didn't have Lafferty to prepare our minds for that realization -- and if Lafferty didn't have SF preparing the ground for him -- we wouldn't be equipped to understand that inevitability.

Death to Everyone, or, 3 Suggestions for Masters Theses, or, "Any action in which I am prepared to lose my life resembles war."

"Electric circuitry has overthrown the regime of "time" and "space" and pours upon us instantly and continuously the concerns of all other men." -Marshall McLuhan








"It’s a border-town tale, a narrative of liminal spaces: the estranging distance between the relative safety of the town and the folkloric weirdness of the countryside, and beyond that the line of the border itself—possibly the Rio Grande between Del Rio, Texas, and Ciudad Acuña, Mexico, if a real rather than idealized geography is in view. But it also exists within the liminal space between realism and fantasy: almost as if, at this early stage, Lafferty has to establish where that line might be, before he can charge directly across it."
                                                -Andrew Ferguson, on "Cabrito"

"Pope Pius II wrote frankly in his "History of Frederick III": "States cannot alter their borders except by war." Several years ago Prime Minister Kekkonen of Finland met with Khrushchev and tried to ask him if little Karelia (the border province between Finland and Russia, lost in 1939) which was sorely missed by the Finns, might not be returned to Finland. Khrushchev who liked Kekkonen very much (Kekkonen visited him in Crimea every year) smiled and answered: "Mr. Kekkonen, you ought to know from history that the borders between states can only be changed by war." People in the world today don't like to hear this, but I think that both the Renaissance Pope and the last Russian Czar are right."
                                                 -Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, from Planetary Service

I have just finished The Medium is the Massage by McLuhan/Fiore. I am currently several chapters into ERH's Planetary Service. I am always thinking of Lafferty. Specifically, right now, I am halfway through Archipelago.

Planetary Service is about a future of peace, of what it means to live in a world post-war, and how borders can ever be challenged and changed without war.

ERH does give honor to borders, to their historic importance, but it is also clear that he is ready for their abolition.

"This contradiction lies across my entire generation: we were all soldiers for the borders of our countries, and we were all already burned by the insight that many borders would have to fall. And these are the words about borders which Peguy left us before his death: "And must I, to rescue from eternal flames the bodies of the damned who despair in torment, give up my own body unto the eternal fire, then, God, throw me into these eternal flames: and need I, to save from the torment those souls damned to stay forever distant, and who despair in their estrangement from You, let my own soul stay estranged, then let my own soul move into the eternal distance, for we can only save our souls together." Here you have one of God's heroes who will not leave any borders standing, not even the borders of hell. And everyone should first pause, considering Peguy's battle, and this contradiction. Only then shall we become serious."

Thesis #1. Lafferty's work exists on borders and boundaries, often charging directly across them.

----------------------

Archipelago is Lafferty's most explicit war novel. Yet, somewhere along the writing process he forgot to include the war in the novel. I remember reading that Lafferty acknowledged this somewhere. I don't remember where.

This afternoon, I listened to this podcast: http://www.artofmanliness.com/2016/02/23/podcast-178-c-s-lewis-j-r-r-tolkien-and-the-inklings-mastermind-group/

Philip and Carol Zaleski wrote a book about the Inklings. Listening to them in this podcast, I didn't learn anything that I didn't already know. BUT! I did take pause when they mentioned that Tolkien and Lewis and all of the other writers in the Inklings were War writers even though they are not often categorized as such. Again, nothing new. But it made me realize that not enough attention is given to Lafferty as a war writer.

Most of the Inklings were WWI vets. Lafferty was a WWII vet. ERH and others make the point that this entire period of world civil war was all a continuation of the same. Both WWI and WWII vets had to deal with many of the same struggles. A new world ensued.

Unfortunately, most of us engaged in any sort of lit crit (pro or armchair) don't know a thing at all about risking our lives for anything. Most of us do not know the sort of heightened fellowship and camaraderie of men at war.

"The disappearance of war threatens us with the loss of the ability to distinguish between play and seriousness. Let us admit openly: war is the prime example of deadly earnestness, absolute earnestness. Any action in which I am prepared to lose my life resembles war." -ERH

Thesis #2. Lafferty is a war writer. Losing life is just the beginning.

----------------------

"World and soul join one another, that is they must join in order to provide meaning. For the world is meaningless. The world would just be uncreated chaos were it not for those who stood up with their lives to provide meaning; every time anew it would become an uncreated chaos in which speech decayed and every border became insurmountable. Chaos does not precede God's creation. No, chaos occurs when we little devils abolish God's word." -ERH

Thesis #3. Chaos occurs when we little devils abolish God's word.


 


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I wrote all of the above a month or so ago. I never did return and shape it into anything more cohesive or convincing. Scratches and sketches. I present it here just the same. Blah.

I'm not sure exactly where I was going with the last one. I think maybe that I was grasping at instances in which Lafferty touches on ACTIVE world-building and that world-destruction is just as real an activity. Maybe.

Yesterday, I started reading E.M. Cioran's The Trouble With Being Born.

Cioran: "Unmaking, decreating, is the only task man may take upon himself, if he aspires, as everything suggests, to distinguish himself from the Creator."

Yesterday evening, a friend killed himself. And sure enough, I along with him am shattered, unmade.

So it goes.

"We'd just as soon drink whiskey tonight, and beer tomorrow," said Finnegan.

Finnegan had a bottle.

Doubtless, it is unnatural to be drunk. But then in a real sense it is unnatural to be human. Doubtless, the intemperate workman wastes his tissues in drinking; but no one knows how much the sober workman wastes his tissues by working. No one knows how much the wealthy philanthropist wastes his tissues by talking; or, in much rarer conditions, by thinking. All the human things are more dangerous than anything that affects the beasts—sex, poetry, property, religion. The real case against drunkenness is not that it calls up the beast, but that it calls up the Devil. It does not call up the beast, and if it did it would not matter much, as a rule; the beast is a harmless and rather amiable creature, as anybody can see by watching cattle. There is nothing bestial about intoxication; and certainly there is nothing intoxicating or even particularly lively about beasts. Man is always something worse or something better than an animal; and a mere argument from animal perfection never touches him at all. Thus, in sex no animal is either chivalrous or obscene. And thus no animal ever invented anything so bad as drunkenness—or so good as drink.
....
For in so far as drinking is really a sin it is not because drinking is wild, but because drinking is tame; not in so far as it is anarchy, but in so far as it is slavery. Probably the worst way to drink is to drink medicinally. Certainly the safest way to drink is to drink carelessly; that is, without caring much for anything, and especially not caring for the drink.

-From Wine When It Is Red


“You are such a nice boy, it's a shame you are always crocked,” Elena said. “Have you had troubles? Do you love one who is unattainable? Are you frustrated in the expression of your talents? Did one you loved greatly die tragically and young? Are you disillusioned by the perfidies of the governments and shapers? Are you dangerously fallen from grace? Are you look for a Paraiso? Have you neglected one and are ashamed? Are you in chemical unbalance? For these reasons you drink?”
“Nueve y uno,” Finnegan said. “Nine yesses and a no. I drink because it is good to drink, and I drink excessively because I have an evil streak.”
“Can't you stop?”
“Anyone can stop at any time. It is as easy as hacking off your hand or plucking out your eye, the matter of a moment. It is better to be maimed than to burn: but it IS a maiming; being weak, I hesitate.”

-From Archipelago


Bless, O Lord, this creature beer, that Thou hast been pleased to bring forth from the sweetness of the grain: that it might be a salutary remedy for the human race: and grant by the invocation of Thy holy name, that, whosoever drinks of it may obtain health of body and a sure safeguard for the soul. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.

-From the Rituale Romanum


Bless the Lord, O my soul. O Lord my God, thou art very great....
He causeth the grass to grow for the cattle, and herb for the service of man: that he may bring forth food out of the earth; And wine that maketh glad the heart of man, and oil to make his face to shine, and bread which strengtheneth man's heart.

-From Psalm 104


The Son of man came eating and drinking, and they say, Behold a man gluttonous, and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners. But wisdom is justified of her children.

-From the Gospel According to St. Matthew


Wherefore be ye not unwise, but understanding what the will of the Lord is. And be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess; but be filled with the Spirit; Speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord; Giving thanks always for all things unto God and the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ; Submitting yourselves one to another in the fear of God.

-From the Epistle to the Ephesians


Thus ends, in unavoidable inadequacy, the attempt to utter the unutterable things. These are my ultimate attitudes towards life; the soils for the seeds of doctrine. These in some dark way I thought before I could write, and felt before I could think: that we may proceed more easily afterwards, I will roughly recapitulate them now. I felt in my bones; first, that this world does not explain itself. It may be a miracle with a supernatural explanation; it may be a conjuring trick, with a natural explanation. But the explanation of the conjuring trick, if it is to satisfy me, will have to be better than the natural explanations I have heard. The thing is magic, true or false. Second, I came to feel as if magic must have a meaning, and meaning must have some one to mean it. There was something personal in the world, as in a work of art; whatever it meant it meant violently. Third, I thought this purpose beautiful in its old design, in spite of its defects, such as dragons. Fourth, that the proper form of thanks to it is some form of humility and restraint: we should thank God for beer and Burgundy by not drinking too much of them. We owed, also, an obedience to whatever made us. And last, and strangest, there had come into my mind a vague and vast impression that in some way all good was a remnant to be stored and held sacred out of some primordial ruin. Man had saved his good as Crusoe saved his goods: he had saved them from a wreck. All this I felt and the age gave me no encouragement to feel it. And all this time I had not even thought of Christian theology.

-From Orthodoxy


DARE TO KNOW YOUR HEROES: http://arr-illustrator.blogspot.com/2015/12/lafferty-in-green-room.html

Lafferty's relationship to alcohol requires an entire book or at least a long essay for Feast of Laughter. Maybe I'll get around to that some day. A close reading of the Argo Cycle is a good place to start to get a full appreciation for Lafferty's multi-faceted love for strong drink. Like Finnegan, like Lafferty, maybe like Chesterton (see here: http://www.catholichousehold.com/chestertons-lack-temperance-block-canonization/), and like so many others, I also have an evil streak. And so, if today I write a blog post and sip my cup of coffee to him rather than raise my glass, I hope he'll forgive me and understand as he splashes around in St. Brigid's heavenly lake of beer.

(buy a print of this image here: https://www.trinitystores.com/store/art-image/st-brigids-lake-beer)

"They gave the Ghostly Thing release"

In this wonderful world, co-incidents happen often.

On the morning of February 7th, 2016, I began to read Archipelago.

Allowing for the logic of time zones and time travel, it is quite likely that I began my early morning reading at the same moment that DOJP posted his other-side-of-the-world-morning blog post, Reading the Argo Cycle - part 1. Whether or not this exact simultaneity occurred, I was more than pleased to find my own thoughts on the opening chapter echoed almost immediately in Daniel's post, as if the cavernous blogoshpere had shouted back my own words before I had shouted them out at all. Not only that, but that the infamous Indiana-Scots Goblin in the netted cave had once again shaped my unvoiced words into a finer shape and sound than I could have done.

So why bother to begin shouting at all when the suddenly pre-existent echo has already done the better job?

I don't know. Probably, because the DOJP-aspect is only one counterpart in one variant account of the Lafferty Fan Man.

Enough.

What do I have to add to the conversation?

Beginnings. My most recent (recent? ha!) blog post and the brief essay that I wrote for FoL2 both attempt to recklessly (I leave the rigor for others) probe into Lafferty's attempts at (non-)endings and how his narrative strategies point past endings toward new beginnings, perhaps as a simulation of "eternal" adventure.

Daniel is right (of course he is!) that the first section of Chapter 1 of Archipelago explicitly calls attention to beginnings. "All this begins," the story begins. "In the same hour at which the world was made" at the same time as "in these latter days." Only a moment between being "in the Garden" and being "in the middle of the World." "A man and a woman" vs. "two guys in a bar." I'm sure that any readers here have already read Daniel's post. If not, go do so.

"The two versions cannot be reconciled, and I worry about it," Finnegan said.

Here is where I think that I can add to Daniel's post. Daniel, in his enthusiasm for this opening has neglected the pre-opening that has come before the opening. The novel does not begin "In a Southern City." It begins (or is preceded by) a poem. The placement of this particular poem in this particular place is surely no accident. I haven't read more than the first chapter of the book yet, but I dare say that the themes of this seemingly silly poem will resurface repeatedly in the novel. Maybe. The poem at least shapes our expectations of what is to come.

Here's the poem in its entirety. I've taken this from the not-to-be-named edition of the novel. I'd love for any of you with Manuscript editions to compare and contrast and let me know if this is all correct; I do wonder at some of the irregularities- I suspect that they are Laffertisms, but can't be sure).

Of fossils from the recent past
 Out of gigantothereous strata
 Across a triple-decade vast,
 Observe the bones! Regard the data!

 Oh dear than the Mastodont!
 They lie in ash of fading ember
 While sexton-beetles eat and hunt
 Lest flesh remain that might remember.  

 A surging gallimauferie
 Of broken reeds upon a charger,
 And something of serenity,
 And something yet a little larger.  

 They knew the evoluting crock,
 They knew a taller star than Vega,
 A firster Peter for a rock,
 Not yet so empty an Omega.  

 They gave the Ghostly Thing release
 From pink-eyed heretics who bound it.
 They sought the ancient Golden Fleece
 And, what is better yet, they found it.  

 Before ‘Triumphant’ grew a taint,
 Before (in catch-words and kerygmies)
 Falsetto Chorus raised its plaint,
 They never knew the race of pygmies;  

 Nor guessed the Situation Bit,
 Nor found the Lord so dull a lover,
 Nor used the love-as-catch-word kit
 A multitude of sins to cover.  

 And some are dead, and some are done,
 Or (fallen to heroics fever)
 Still oddly seek the All-in-One
 And some are better folks than you are. 

—R. A. Lafferty

In this microcosmic "prehistory" of the novel, we immediately have a tension between the long-ago and the present, summed up nicely as "Of fossils from the recent past," perhaps a reflection on Lafferty's own sense of out-of-placeness and out-of-timeness, that what is most immediately present to him are the events of a personally present past that the world has long since moved on from.

The first two stanzas present this notion of the bringing present of a forgotten world/time. (Observe the bones!) The third stanza re-introduces these forgotten fossils as a "surging gallimauferie/Of broken reeds upon a charger," which is a lovely image.

This surging stew of broken reeds has known the "evoluting crock," which is likely simultaneously a dig at certain evolutionary theories at the same time that it concretely presents the pre-historic pot in which these characters have been cooked up.

The rest of the poem rousingly presents these "reeds" as living large lives, as those Argonauts (a crew of broken reed heroes if ever there was one) who have sought the Golden Fleece and, better yet, found it. Whatever else, this poem is important for first introducing this Argonautic theme. I may be wrong, but I suspect that it is important that Lafferty connects the "Ghostly Thing" (which I read, maybe wrongly, as a reference to the work of the Holy Spirit) to the Golden Fleece. And as the poem nears its end, there is an implicit eschatology in Lafferty's protology.

"Before 'Triumphant' grew a taint" is a rallying cry for all to finish well, triumphantly (in basso profundo chorus) following a giant wild lover, whether dead or done or fallen to heroics fever.

*Side note: I've been thinking a lot lately about Lafferty's Romances and the way that sexuality (broadly speaking) is exhibited in and between his male and female characters. The explicit Fleece/Argo/Jason connection makes me wonder if we'll get a Medea character at any time in this book. In the Argonautica, Medea is key to obtaining the Golden Fleece. Will it be so here? As the story transitions from this high-falutin' legend-alludin' to something more mundane (moving "episodically to the events of the war buddies leaving the war and returning home, and then their lives back in the States," as Daniel puts it), will there even be a recognizable Fleece moment? Am I making too much of this Argo connection and/or straining for 1:1 correspondences while Lafferty is playing much looser? Eh, we'll see. I'm still going to be on the lookout for Medea(s).

ALL THE ENDINGS, or THERE AREN'T ANY ENDINGS

I finished The Annals of Klepsis last night.

Here's an excerpt from the last chapter:

------

  The Tarshish storyteller was there with us on the top of the mountain.
  "Story-man, what is a good ending for the present story?" Titus asked him.
  "I get most of my stories from my dreams, and from old legends. I have dreamed, many times and oft, everything here exactly as it has been happening. I dream it up to the point where the slave-mathematician is struck by lightning, and then my dream will stall and go no further. I only hope that the world won't stall and go no further forever. The old legends on it are pretty much the same. The endings of them are very weak and contrived. I just don't know how this episode is going to end."

-----

Now, I wouldn't ever say that Lafferty's novel endings are "weak and contrived." They are, however, always startlingly unsatisfying and abrupt. Instead of giving closure, they announce that dangerously new beginnings have arrived.

This morning, I was reminded of Chapter 6 of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy's The Fruit of Lips. The chapter is titled "End Begets Beginning." In this entire work, Rosenstock-Huessy argues that the Gospel writers were aware of one another's work, that the Gospels were written in the canonical order in which they have been received, and that there is a very real unity amid the diversity. At the beginning of Chapter 6, Rosenstock-Huessy argues that the end of each Gospel feeds into the beginning of the next.

-----
"Do they give evidence of mutual dependence beyond the "material" used? Yes, they do. They beget each other. Every Gospel begins exactly at the point to which the previous Gospel has progressed on its tortuous path. The last word of the one is the overture and sets the tone for the next......
  If this is so, then the Gospels continue each other, each beginning to think and to speak where the previous evangelist had ended, and turning his final word into the opening of a new drama."

-----

Anyhow, I got to thinking again that this is true of all great literature. Certainly, the rest of the Bible has this kind of character. Often, it's more general. Reading one book is enriched by reading another and on and on until you're back to reading the first and understanding it all the better and realizing what you've missed. So there's this rich intertextuality. But it's also common for the biblical books to end on a note of pointing toward something that will happen NEXT.

Genesis ends pointing to the Exodus:
"And Joseph said unto his brethren, I die: and God will surely visit you, and bring you out of this land unto the land which he sware to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob. And Joseph took an oath of the children of Israel, saying, God will surely visit you, and ye shall carry up my bones from hence. So Joseph died, being an hundred and ten years old: and they embalmed him, and he was put in a coffin in Egypt."

Exodus ends with the glory of the LORD filling the tabernacle and Israel on the move:
"Then a cloud covered the tent of the congregation, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle. And Moses was not able to enter into the tent of the congregation, because the cloud abode thereon, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle. And when the cloud was taken up from over the tabernacle, the children of Israel went onward in all their journeys: But if the cloud were not taken up, then they journeyed not till the day that it was taken up. For the cloud of the Lord was upon the tabernacle by day, and fire was on it by night, in the sight of all the house of Israel, throughout all their journeys."

And so on. I think that most of the books in the Bible do this in some way or another. Very often, even within books, there is an end which begets a new beginning.

Also, many of the biblical books end abruptly, in some way concluding its own story, but always pointing beyond itself.

The very last book of the bible, in its own way, is an extreme example of this. It does not end with the Return of the King and the "conclusion" of the story. It ends with a plea for the Return of the King and a promise of this coming. But it is still essentially open-ended. It's not quite a To Be Continued; it is most definitely an announcement of a New Heaven and New Earth because the old has passed away. That is a biblical pattern and it's one that I think that Lafferty either consciously or unconsciously adopts. I suspect the former.

I don't know if I'm up to the task, but what I'd like to eventually do is synthesize Lafferty's world destruction/renewals with Rosenstock-Huessy's insights on time and speech and James Jordan's biblical theology. The three are already in conversation in my head, but it's all intuitive grasping. I need to buckle down eventually and start taking notes on each.

Finally, while writing the above little bit and thinking about how Lafferty's non-endings relate to Biblical non-endings, I remembered N.T. Wright's 5-act play analogy. There's a similarity (and dissimilarity) between the way in which Wright describes the Bible's pushing toward reader-participants finishing the "play" and the way that Lafferty's work pushes reader-participants into finishing the "play." I think that these parallels become a bit clearer as well with a preterist understanding of the importance of the 70ad destruction of Jerusalem being a real (NOT a literary metaphor, as ERH would say, despite its beings poetic) destruction of a world, marking the end of an entire cosmos (see any treatment of temple as cosmos) as a new world becomes fully birthed IN the death of the old.

Wright:

There are various ways in which stories might be thought to possess authority.  Sometimes a story is told so that the actions of its characters may be imitated.  It was because they had that impression that some early Fathers, embarrassed by the possibilities inherent in reading the Old Testament that way, insisted upon allegorical exegesis.  More subtly, a story can be told with a view to creating a generalized ethos which may then be perpetuated this way or that.  The problem with such models, popular in fact though they are within Christian reading of scripture, is that they are far too vague: they constitute a hermeneutical grab-bag or lucky dip.  Rather, I suggest that stories in general, and certainly the biblical story, has a shape and a goal that must be observed and to which appropriate response must be made.

But what might this appropriate response look like?  Let me offer you a possible model, which is not in fact simply an illustration but actually corresponds, as I shall argue, to some important features of the biblical story, which (as I have been suggesting) is that which God has given to his people as the means of his exercising his authority.  Suppose there exists a Shakespeare play whose fifth act had been lost.  The first four acts provide, let us suppose, such a wealth of characterization, such a crescendo of excitement within the plot, that it is generally agreed that the play ought to be staged.  Nevertheless, it is felt inappropriate actually to write a fifth act once and for all: it would freeze the play into one form, and commit Shakespeare as it were to being prospectively responsible for work not in fact his own.  Better, it might be felt, to give the key parts to highly trained, sensitive and experienced Shakespearian actors, who would immerse themselves in the first four acts, and in the language and culture of Shakespeare and his time, and who would then be told to work out a fifth act for themselves.

Consider the result.  The first four acts, existing as they did, would be the undoubted ‘authority’ for the task in hand.  That is, anyone could properly object to the new improvisation on the grounds that this or that character was now behaving inconsistently, or that this or that sub-plot or theme, adumbrated earlier, had not reached its proper resolution.  This ‘authority’ of the first four acts would not consist in an implicit command that the actors should repeat the earlier pans of the play over and over again.  It would consist in the fact of an as yet unfinished drama, which contained its own impetus, its own forward movement, which demanded to be concluded in the proper manner but which required of the actors a responsible entering in to the story as it stood, in order first to understand how the threads could appropriately be drawn together, and then to put that understanding into effect by speaking and acting with both innovation and consistency.

This model could and perhaps should be adapted further; it offers in fact quite a range of possibilities.  Among the detailed moves available within this model, which I shall explore and pursue elsewhere, is the possibility of seeing the five acts as follows: (1) Creation; (2) Fall; (3) Israel; (4) Jesus.  The New Testament would then form the first scene in the fifth act, giving hints as well (Rom 8; 1 Car 15; parts of the Apocalypse) of how the play is supposed to end.  The church would then live under the ‘authority’ of the extant story, being required to offer something between an improvisation and an actual performance of the final act.  Appeal could always be made to the inconsistency of what was being offered with a major theme or characterization in the earlier material.  Such an appeal—and such an offering!—would of course require sensitivity of a high order to the whole nature of the story and to the ways in which it would be (of course) inappropriate simply to repeat verbatim passages from earlier sections.  Such sensitivity (cashing out the model in terms of church life) is precisely what one would have expected to be required; did we ever imagine that the application of biblical authority ought to be something that could be done by a well-programmed computer?

http://ntwrightpage.com/Wright_Bible_Authoritative.htm

Andrew F.:

"Lafferty is always seeking, through his fiction, to reach out and find those who will join him in creating and sustaining new worlds. Most of his books reach their peaks not in moments of intense action, but in moments of extreme connectivity, with two or more people coming into sudden rapport, a mutual understanding strong enough to resonate throughout the multiplicity of worlds. Thus in Archipelagothe climax comes not at the end—and how could it? As Lafferty notes in his essay, there aren’t any endings—but instead at the St. Louis Conclave, with nearly all of his characters gathered together and drawing sparks off one another."

[Sorry for any wonky formatting errors. I started this on my laptop this morning and finished it in my phone. And the usual apologies for the general rambling incoherence.]

'the musics'

Excerpts from Lafferty's review of the anthology Some Things Dark and Dangerous:

"All are suspense stories, wonder stories; all are mystery stories, in a sense, though none is a conventional detective story and certainly none is a formula story. Three of them might be called Science Fiction (at the name of which all honest hearts must leap with pleasure!); all are pretty much Blood and Thunder (“as simple as the thunger of Heaven and the blood of men” as Chesterton once defended the type). 

At this point, from the covert enemies of the Lively Arts, there come two automatic protests, and we must answer them.

Is there any real importance in producing another collection of old stories even if it is ‘good material sunk out of sight’?

Is there any importance at all (while the eschatological things are standing up tall and crying for attention) to be found in the inferior and trivial art form of the suspense story, a surrogate or life-escapist device?

(Really, it is no more life-escapist than are any other cultural accretions since the breechclout and the fist-axe; and it retains more of the clout and the axe than do most other forms.)

The first answer is that there may be importance in collections of old and valid fact and fiction. No great book has ever come about in any other way than this. It was the mechanism of Scripture, of all the Epics, of the Arabian Nights, of the works of the Bard and of the Comedist who produced no more than superior collections of old material. Not that this is a great book, but it would be a great book if it stood alone of its kind. And the Iliad would not be a great book if it stood with a dozen others of like sort.

The second answer is that there may be intrinsic importance in the suspense story. The whole life affair is a suspense story, and this cannot be said about any other sort of literature. And it can itself be eschatological."

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"And the suspense story has had noble practitioners. A writing acquaintance (an unbeliever) once gave me the opinion that God the Father, on the basis of some hundred striking narrations in both Testaments, would have to be classed as one of the three greatest masters of the suspense story. And I have it on peculiar authority that He enjoys these things Himself, and that there is much in literature that He does not enjoy.

God the Father, however, is not represented directly in this collection."

-----

"If man is the only creature who laughs (this may be argued; poltergeist and several animals snigger and chortle; likely all the higher creatures laugh; certainly the Creator does), man is not the only creature who experiences suspense. All the animals, all the creatures experience it. It is the necessary tension, and without it the limbs would be unstrung.

But it may be that man is the only creature who has experienced changes (two changes) in the nature of Suspense. One was at the time of the Fall (those of other orientation may call it the Hiatus or the Amnesia or they may call it nothing at all, but they must recognize that something happened then). At the time of the Fall, man went into a state of Suspended Animation. Or perhaps it was a state of Animated Suspense. It must have been a frighteningly powerful state from the disguised memories we still carry of it. Certain animals and persons and intermediate spirits are in that case yet."

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"The second change in the nature of Suspense was at the time of the Redemption (those of other orientation may call it the End of an Era or the Anamnesis, but they must recognize that something happened then). The suspense was not abolished; perhaps it was sanctified. Some of the dread was removed, but the bow itself was not unstrung. The tension was likely increased, but tension in grace became more possible. Suspense is now a requirement of the pleasure principle, of the victory principle, of the high comedy of being. And it will be a requirement of the Vision, which will not be static. It is a necessity to the feeling of immediacy, to the constant newness of outlook and experience. It is at the heart (the courage) of things.

Suspense is not the same thing as uncertainty, not the same as apprehension, not the same as doubt, not quite the same thing as danger, certainly not the same as fear.

Might bold claims, those! Can one stand and produce on the subject? No, I cannot, and probably you cannot produce for any powerful interest of your own. But in this collection, and others like it, there are fleeting pieces of something important, and they must be caught on the fly. We lack the right words for all these things (Suspense is not the right word), and we lack the means of tying them together. The Lively Arts, the Lively Sciences, the Lively Eschatologies, the Lively Congresses of every sort are all of one thing which the Greeks called simply ‘the musics’ and for which we lack any correct word."