'The world turns in its sleep, and parts of the world have moments of wakefulness' (brief review of the short story 'And Walk Now Gently Through the Fire')

Well, I tried to post the following as a comment on the short story section of the R. A. Lafferty Devotional Page (where all of Lafferty's stories are listed out with the webmaster's rating & opinion of the story and the option for you to comment).  But though I'm registered, it refuses to work for me.  So here's a brief off-the-top-of-my-head review of one of my fave stories by Laff (from which this blog gets its name).

UPDATE (23 Nov 2014):  Well, looky here!  http://www.ralafferty.org/works/stories/  A whole new place to discuss each and every one of Lafferty's 200+ short stories!  Nice!  (The creator of this new Lafferty website is working very hard to make an exhaustive, interwoven, interactive, one-stop, poly-crosslinked site of Laffertian lore and treasure - show him your support and make use of the site!)

The story 'review':

"To you who are scattered and broken, gather again and mend. Rebuild always, and again I say rebuild. Renew the face of the earth. It is a loved face, but now it is covered with the webs of tired spiders."

Lafferty's short story "And Walk Now Gently Through the Fire" (1972) is funny, wise, nicely styled; a well-imagined philosophical post-apocalypse (in a Laffertian folklorish tone, of course).  It's written in Lafferty's Oklahoma regional mode, what I call 'buffalopunk' (which infuses most everything he writes to one degree or another). 

I rate the story 'excellent'.  [The RAL Devotional Page has only the three ratings:  lame, ok, excellent.]

This story was one of the earliest I read by Laff that got me searching out all his stuff.  Some of his fans don't like it when he gets explicitly theological, but I tend to love it.  Some will only barely notice that this story is theological and some will find it too glaring.  I think it's beautifully done.  It's kind of like a Chestertonian Screwtape Letters written by Mark Twain. (That description should alert you to the presence of biting satire.  But the tone of the story is still very warm and invitational and hopeful, even humble, and not merely acerbic.)

If more 'religious believers' in the modern world had the kind of life-affirming, ecologically rich (pay attention to the cattle, landscape, birds, and bees), constructive, beautiful, creatively countercultural, and good-humoured worldview this story exhibits, there wouldn't be so much 'secular' or 'pagan' overreaction to religion, with its own oppressive and reductive counter-fundamentalisms.    

"There was, of course, the acre of fire, the field of fire.  This acre was large enough to contain all that needed to be contained:  it is always there, wherever reality is.  There are tides that come and go; but even the lowest ebbing may not mean the end of the world.  And then there are the times and tides of clarity, the jubilees, the sabbaticals.  There is reassurance given.  The world turns in its sleep, and parts of the world have moments of wakefulness."

The Re-Doomer Who Wrangles for Us a Second and Better Doom (wishing you a Laffertian Good Friday)

Know that religion is a repetitious act or it is nothing. The “re” is the holy prefix, since nothing is successful the first time. It must be forever the “re,” the returning, the restructuring, the re-lexion, the reconstitution, the building back from defeat. We will rebuild in the dark and in the light; we will work without ceasing.

Even our mysterious Maker was the Re-deemer, the re-doomer who wrangles for us a second and better doom, the ransomer, the re-buyer, the re-d-emptor. We are sold and we are ransomed, we are lost and we are found. We are dead and we are re-surrected, which is to say “surged up again.”

-R. A. Lafferty, 'And Walk Now Gently Through the Fire' (1972)

Sacred Visions (1991).  Contents:  Gus / Jack McDevitt -- Pope of the Chimps / Robert Silverberg -- Curious elation / Michael Cassutt -- Trinity / Nancy Kress -- Saint Theresa of the aliens / James Patrick Kelly -- Our lady of the endless sky / Jeff Duntemann -- Seraph from its sepulcher / Gene Wolfe -- Case of conscience / James Blish -- Xorinda the witch / Andrew Greeley -- Canticle for Leibowitz / Walter M. Miller, Jr. -- Quest for Saint Aquin / Anthony Boucher -- Walk now gently through the fire / R. A. Lafferty.

Dream, Float, Burn - Lafferty, Painting, & Punk Rock

My friend, Stephen Cefalo, made a wee video announcement of his upcoming exhibition of paintings,  'Dream, Float, Burn', and used a track from my 'post-punk' band Voice of the Mysterons.  Why this is of interest to the Lafferty blog is that the refrain being sung here is the title of one of Lafferty's short stories:  'And Walk Now Gently Through the Fire' (1972).  I think the imagery and sound go well together and perhaps even complement Lafferty's writing.  And it's a small and very obscure instance of Lafferty being referenced in popular culture.

'It was all very clear, for being in the middle of a mystery' - A Greeting for the Christmas Season from R. A. Lafferty

The candle molders were busy.  Candle molders?  Yes, ten at least of them were working away there, or ten thousand.  And full ten thousand bees brought wax to each of them.  There would be very many candles burning through the white evening and the white night and on into the white dawn.  Then these weren't ordinary candle molders or ordinary bees?  No, no, they were the extraordinary of both; they had reality clinging to them in globs of light.  Events gathered into constellations.

One using words wrongly  or in their usual way might say that everything had taken on a dreamlike quality.  No, but it had all lost its old nightmarish quality.  It had all taken on, not a dreamlike quality, but the quality of reality.

There was, of course, the acre of fire, the field of fire.  This acre was large enough to contain all that needed to be contained:  it is always there, wherever reality is.  There are tides that come and go; but even the lowest ebbing may not mean the end of the world.  And then there are the times and tides of clarity, the jubilees, the sabbaticals.  There is reassurance given.  The world turns in its sleep, and parts of the world have moments of wakefulness.

Ten million bees had not brought all the wax for that acre of fire, and yet it was a very carefully structured fire in every tongue and flame of it.  It was the benevolent illumination and fire of reality.  It was all very clear, for being in the middle of a mystery.  White night turned into white dawn; and the people all moved easily into the fire, their pomposities forgiven, their eyes open.

The Mysterious Master and Maker of the Worlds came again and walked upon this world in that Moment.  He often does so.  The Moment is recurring but undivided.

No, we do not say that it was Final Morning.  We are not out of it so easily as that.  But the moment is all one. Pleasantly into the fire that is reality then!  It will sustain through all the lean times of flimsiness before and after.

-R. A. Lafferty, 'And Walk Now Gently Through the Fire' (1972)

Judy Thatcher's Epistle to the Church of Omaha in Dispersal

To you who are scattered and broken, gather again and mend. Rebuild always, and again I say rebuild. Renew the face of the earth. It is a loved face, but now it is covered with the webs of tired spiders.

We are in a post-catastrophe world, and yet the catastrophes did not happen. There are worse things than catastrophes. There is the surrender of the will before even the catastrophes come. There are worse things than war. There are worse things even than unjust war: unjust peace or crooked peace is worse. To leave life by withdrawal is worse than to leave life by murder. To be bored of the world is worse than to shed all the blood in the world. There are worse things than final Armageddon. Being too tired and wobble-eyed for final combat is worse. There are things worse than lust—the sick surrogates of lust are worse. There are things worse than revolution—the half-revolution, the mere turning away, is worse.

Know that religion is a repetitious act or it is nothing. The “re” is the holy prefix, since nothing is successful the first time. It must be forever the “re,” the returning, the restructuring, the re-lexion, the reconstitution, the building back from defeat. We will rebuild in the dark and in the light; we will work without ceasing.

Even our mysterious Maker was the Re-deemer, the re-doomer who wrangles for us a second and better doom, the ransomer, the re-buyer, the re-d-emptor. We are sold and we are ransomed, we are lost and we are found. We are dead and we are re-surrected, which is to say “surged up again.”

You ask me about the Parousia, the second coming. This has been asked from the beginning. There was urgent expectation of it in the beginning. Then, in the lifetimes of those first ones, there came a curious satisfaction, as though the coming had been experienced anew, as though it were a constant and almost continuing thing. Perhaps there has been a second coming, and a third, and a three hundredth. Perhaps, as the legend has it, it comes every sabbatical, every seventh year. I do not know. I was not of the chosen at the time of the last sabbatical. We are in the days of a new one, but I know now I will not be alive for the day of it.

Be steadfast. Rebuild, restructure, reinstitute, renew.

X-Dmo. Judy Thatcher (one of the Twelve).

-R. A. Lafferty, 'And Walk Now Gently Through the Fire' (1972)

The First-Ever Book of Essays On Lafferty (for which I will contribute a chapter)?!?!

Ok, after about a year's silence on this blog, I'm picking it up again. I'm delighted to report that I've been asked to write a chapter for an upcoming book of essays about the fiction of R. A. Lafferty (the first ever!). This is being pulled together from various sources by Andrew Ferguson (who recently wrote his MA dissertation on Lafferty's carnivalesque world-building narrative strategy - a very lengthy in-depth, technical, and thrilling read!). It may be sometime before the proposed book sees publication and, of course, my chapter will only be included if it 'makes the grade'. But I'm honoured and thrilled to be asked to contribute and to have this opportunity.

The contributors to the book will be looking at Lafferty and his large, diverse, and brilliantly/notoriously unconventional body of fiction from various angles. I've been asked to cover Lafferty as a Catholic/Christian storyteller, sort of an Irish American G. K. Chesterton. He was one of the very best of the 2oth century and puts so much 'Christian art' to shame. I will probably begin by looking at the praise heaped on him by the New Wave s.f. movement from which he emerged and how 'new weird'/'urban fantasy' writers like Neil Gaiman still praise and emulate him, none of whom share his Catholic faith, yet all of whom find a companion, mentor, and inspiration in him.

Then the main body of the chapter will look at how Lafferty's fiction evinces his Christian worldview inventively, invitingly, feistily, and generously, mainly in the short story 'And Walk Now Gently Through the Fire'. But probably also with reference to some elements in the novels Past Master, Arrive At Easterwine, and Fourth Mansions, as well as other short stories like 'In Deepest Glass', 'Symposium', and 'Days of Grass, Days of Straw'.

I'm toward the end of doing a close reading of 'Walk Now' (that I've written previously about on this blog here). This story is about the Queer Fish, who are also called the Ants of God 'for their building proclivities' that are troublesome in an 'unstructured, destructed, destroyed society' (and now you can see where the title of the blog derives from). It is a story full of laughing irony and biting satire that paints a bleak picture of the possibility of 'post-humanity' only to incite a very rowdy hope for redemption, toward which we are urged to build, to reconstruct, to renew. I'll be quoting some passages from it in upcoming posts.

Please feel free to make suggestions of how I ought to tackle this subject!