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."

-----

"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."

-----

"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."

DOWN WITH THE DEAD MEN

There's a part of Chapter 10 of The Devil is Dead that is one of my favorite passages in all of the Lafferty that I've read so far. I've written in the past, here and on FB, about how much I love Lafferty's joyous deaths, his raucous goodtime violence. One of my favorite theologians has commented on pacifism that its chief problem is that it misplaces the antithesis, replacing a struggle between Righteous (Seed of the Woman) and Unrighteous (Seed of the Serpent) with a struggle between Righteous (Peaceniks) and Unrighteous (Warmongers). In the former story, the Righteous community enjoys headcrushing and has a limp from all the wrestling it does. In the latter story, headcrushing and wrestling are always forms of oppression and inherently evil. Lafferty was no pacifist.

Needless to say, Lafferty's violence is a full-bodied Ancient violence, lusty and good. But that's not to say that all violence and all death in Lafferty's worlds is always a positive good. There IS a violence and a death that is a sundering of created good. Even a proper recognition that this type of death and violence is impermanent and a less full instance of reality, an unfinished business as it were, is not enough to ease the hearts of those who experience such a thing.

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

  A lady took Finnegan to a near house. There he saw Anastasia his dead sister. She still had the smile of a happy pixie and her eyes were only half closed. They had put her on a sofa there. She had been shot once only. She had been wet.
  "She fell off the breakwater when she was shot," someone said. "She was dead when we pulled her out."
  An orthodox priest was there. "I gave her the last rites," he said. "Then I wondered if she had become a Roman. She had a Roman rosary. Do you know?"
  "No. She was not a Roman. I gave her the rosary," Finnegan said.
  This was all too matter-of-fact.
  "You had better go and hide," the priest told him. "They plan to find you and kill you also. You and the big man they are looking for. It is dangerous for you to be down here."
  The priest told Finnegan several other things that he did not quite understand with his insufficient Greek.
  Finnegan slipped away with Manuel up the hill. Finn had all this time carried a gin bottle in his hand, the same that he had taken up on the mountain as a sovereign against premonitions. He had carried it through the rough climb down the mountain, through the alley off the street of the dead men, into the house where his sister was dead, and up onto the mountain again.
  "I must be depraved," he said.
  But he didn't throw it away.

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

All of Chapter 10 is remarkable (as is the whole novel) and I recommend that you read or re-read it.

A friend died a few weeks ago, suddenly, unexpectedly. I didn't see her face at or after her death but I imagine it like this: "She still had the smile of a happy pixie and her eyes were only half closed."

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

Apologies to anyone who was following along with my Klepsis project. I won't be finishing my Klepsis "live-tweeting" and I probably won't post about it here again until I've finished the whole thing.

Do we all have our salt? It's important that we should.

  "What is your line, Long John Tong Tyrone?" Terpsichore asked.

  "History," I said, for I am Long John Tong Tyrone, the probably Eurasian peg-leg. "Do we all have our salt? It's important that we should."

  Slowing for our landing at Klepsis Third Port, we came over a little arm of the ocean. The oceans of Klepsis lack salt, and all visitors to the planet must make a token contribution.

  "I don't have any salt," Terpsichore moaned. "I'd forgotten about that requirement."

  "There's a man in the whiskey bar who'll sell you a hectogram of salt for one thousand Klepsis thalers," Gold Coast said with perhaps a touch of cruelty. "You can't leave the ship without making a ritual offering of salt, you know."

  "Oh, oh, I can't afford one thousand thalers," Terpsichore complained. "And I can't afford not to disembark here either. Oh, oh!"

  "I got some, pet," Conchita told her. I thought I'd better bring an extra pack. Here. You have to pour it into the ocean yourself. Good. I bet that makes it a lot saltier. But there isn't any history on Klepsis, Long John Tong Tyrone."

  "Then I'll find some," I said, "or I'll make some."

This is my favorite passage from Chapter 1. I love how compactly it communicates so much. This adventure is a bring-your-own-salt adventure. If you've got no salt, you may as well go home.

Salt is spoken of literally in the story, but it's also surely a metaphor.

Salt indicates experience, worthiness, maybe even a lustiness. Especially in a naval context, these resonances will be present. Familiar to us are phrases like "salty sea dog" and "worth his salt" and, from a different angle, "salt of the earth."

Salt is also a component of the human body, most prominently featured in our blood, sweat, and tears, semen and urine. Salt is an indication of effort and a sign of life. We extrude salt when we work, when we bleed, when we cry, when we procreate. We have so much of it that we cast off excess as waste product.

So, the most lively of us are the saltiest.

Here we get a subtle moment of character development. Terpsichore doesn't have any salt. Conchita has an overabundance, enough for herself and to cover others.

Finally, there's even more to the metaphor. It is a "ritual offering" of salt. This makes the ocean of Klepsis an altar and perhaps sets up the characters as having a priestly role to play on the planet.

You shall season all your grain offerings with salt. You shall not let the salt of the covenant with your God be missing from your grain offering; with all your offerings you shall offer salt. - Leviticus 2:13

All the holy contributions that the people of Israel present to the LORD I give to you, and to your sons and daughters with you, as a perpetual due. It is a covenant of salt forever before the LORD for you and for your offspring with you." - Numbers 18:19

And all of this salt talk is sandwiched between Long John Tong Tyrone's statement that he is looking for history, so that at the end of the section, when he says, "I'll find some or I'll make some," we are inclined to believe him. 

------ 

 Some more rambling thoughts on Ch 1: 

 1. I love the opening line, "Remember these things, burn them into your mind, think of them always:" Surely up there among the great Lafferty first lines. The list of things and people that follows is also lovely.

2. It's all very funny, the "tall tale of the peggies" especially. Much of the humor is based on ethnicity, something that Lafferty's generation was perhaps both more comfortable with and more sensitive to. And of course Lafferty had firsthand knowledge of being an "inferior race."

"If they have Irish names, they are Irish altogether," Brannagan laid it down. "Few of the other breeds would be caught dead with an Irish name." 

 3. Ethnicity again. Lafferty wins all awards and passes all tests when it comes to the recent sf clamoring for diversity.

"Of the three peg-legs on the flight from Apateon Planet to Klepsis, one was clearly black, one was probably Gaea-Earth Eurasian, and one plainly Latino; their names were Andrew "Gold Coast" O'Mally, Long John Tong Tyrone, and Conchita O'Brian. Gold Coast and Long John had their left legs missing, Conchita her right. "When are you going to have your leg cut off, Terps?" Conchita asked Terpsichore Callagy. "There's several people getting amputated now down by the ship's handball court. You get a rebate on your passage after you get your leg cut off. You'd better go get it done now."

  "I wasn't going to have my leg cut off at all," Terpsichore said. "I'm very much against the whole idea. It'd hurt."

  "But you already got your name changed to an Irish one," Conchita reminded her. "That hurts more than having a leg cut off."

  "Callagy is my real name," Terpsichore explained. 

 "Nobody's real name is Callagy, Conchita insisted. 

Again, very funny. But the point of reproducing this here is to show off the diversity. 

 

One was clearly black, 

Andrew "Gold Coast" O'Mally 

Andrew is a manly name. 

"Gold Coast" is likely a reference to Ghana. 

O'Mally is a good bad Irish name. 

One was probably Gaea-Earth Eurasian,

Long John Tong Tyrone

(The "probably" is extra funny considering that this is a description of the narrator himself.)

Long John is a good pirate name. John refers to the graciousness of YHWH.

Tong and its variants is a fairly common Asian and Pacific Island name.

Tyrone is a good bad Irish name.

One plainly Latino,

Conchita O'Brian

Conchita is a Spanish name, either little seashell or little conception, a possible Marian connection, but the seashell connection makes it clear that this one belongs to the sea.

O'Brian is a good bad Irish name. 

Terpsichore Callagy

Terpsichore is a Greek name, one of the Nine Muses, associated with dance and music.

Callagy is a good bad Irish name.

4.There's a lot more to write about Ch 1: the My God What Grapes, the descriptions of pirate affectations, the properties of Klepsis, the "Prince" who recklessly courts death and wins big (also a prince as pauper or outcast prince trope going on there), the meaning and sources of history, the uses and abuses of maps. There really is a LOT packaged into one short chapter, but it is also a breeze to read and the best kind of fun. I'm more than ready to move to Ch 2.

5. I've noted this before on FB, but figured I'd note it again. Lafferty's individual sentences can rarely stand alone. Each is a brick in the building of something greater than itself. With some wonderful exceptions, one Lafferty sentence on its own can often be shrugged off. One Lafferty paragraph on its own must often be marveled at. A Lafferty chapter has a powerful cumulative effect that is greater even than the paragraphs. And one reason that I love the novels more than the stories is that this expanse is allowed to spread itself and build into something much greater than its component parts.

And the humanly inhabited universe--that's us!

Some very preliminary thoughts on Annals of Klepsis, "focusing" on the preface before Canto 1 and the Table of Contents.

1. The preface by Karl Sayon (a parody of Carl Sagan, yes?) starts with talk of a Tertiary Focus.

It's unknown what the first and second are.

I didn't know anything about the Latin etymology of "focus" so I looked it up.
Focus - "point of convergence" from Latin focus "hearth, fireplace" (also, figuratively, "home, family")
"http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=focus
So, that's probably a rabbit trail; I don't know yet.

2. The Doomsday Equation: "The humanly inhabited universe, with its four Suns and seventeen planets, is an unstable closed system of human orientation and precarious balance, a kinetic three-dimensional ellipse in form, with its third focus always approaching extinction. As with any similar unstable premise-system, the entire construct must follow its third focus into extinction."

Lafferty's entire universe is anthropocentric, "of human orientation" and (therefore?) of precarious balance.

Can any Lafferty fans name the seventeen planets? Have they all been named? I can think of Astrobe, Camiroi, Kentauron Mikron, and Gaea-Earth. I riffled through Sindbad and found the name of Dahae. Then there's Klepsis, of course.

The mention of the "ellipse" gives further context to the "tertiary focus" line. I'm a math dope, so maybe someone can give more details, but an ellipse has two foci, right? So a third focus would unbalance the thing? Or does this have to do with the three-dimensionality of the ellipse? And it's a kinetic ellipse, chasing its third focus. Again, I don't know if this is wonkiness or if there is some math speculation going on here that I don't catch.

3. I'm still fuzzy on what the Third Focus is, but this Preface really is just a tease and set-up, so that's to be expected. "The third focus of the humanly inhabited universe has been determined to be both a point and a person on the Planet Klepsis." Again with the person-centeredness. One-third of the foci maintaining the ellipse of the known universe is a person.

4. More details are given about this person who is the third focus.
Location - surface of Klepsis
Code Name - Horeshoe Nail
Age - more than two hundred years
Condition - "He cannot be allowed to awake, and he cannot be allowed to die."

5. The Table of Contents. I could speculate on the titles, but that wouldn't do much good. What interests me about the ToC and what I want to bring up is that Lafferty has structured the story by Cantos instead of Chapters. Why is this? When I think of Cantos, I immediately think of Dante and his Comedy, but I'm not sure that there are any strong Dante references going on. There are many other poems that use Cantos, but I think that what is important is that it is a literary structuring device of Italian origin and that Canto is related to song. Annals of Klepsis is the Italian song epic about the Irish pirate planet! It is the Aloysius and the Lafferty joyously dancing around one another. And speaking of Aloysius, the back cover says that he'll be making an appearance!

I'm reading the book slowly. The plan right now is to read a chapter a week, then re-read the chapter and "live-tweet" it during slow moments during the week. This is pretty much what I did with Sindbad and that worked out well since it is still probably my favorite Laff novel. https://twitter.com/KlepsisAnnals