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.

Sizeable Excerpt from The Devil Is Dead

A song I wrote called 'Close Encounters of the Ominous Ape-Cat' was inspired by a chapter from Lafferty's novel The Devil Is Dead. On my theology of monsters blog I quote a sizeable excerpt from the novel, from the chapter called '36,000 Pieces of Paper', which I reproduce here:

'It was nighttime, and Finnegan had gone feral.

'He did not, as Papa Devil had done briefly, regrow his lost stripes and become a tiger. Finnegan was a smaller and other breed of cat; or ape, perhaps; or climbing grotesquerie.

'There was in that city a small hotel of curious gothic style. It ran up to parapets and to those stone knobs that are called merlons. At this moment there was a living gargoyle sitting on one of those merlons and it seemed perfectly natural there. Such places are their dens, their nests.

'The gargoyle was carved of dark brown stone that seemed blue in the dark and the ambient half-light. It had climbed up the outside of the building for six stories to come to roost there. Those things can climb; and the little hotel of gothic style was covered with ornamentation that made the climbing easier...

'For two or three days and nights now, there had been a legend in that city (they love legends there) of an ape or monstrous man that climbed up the outsides of the buildings at night and roosted on the pinnacles. It was even said that this was one of the stone gargoyles from an ornamental building come to life. It wasn't, though. It was Finnegan.

'On an ornamentation of stone six stories up, he perched above the dark street. Through a blade-thin slit between drapes of a sixth floor window, Finnegan looked inside at a coven or meeting of gargoyles. "You have to admit that we are funny looking," Finnegan said to himself.

There were the four senior gargoyles from the Brunehilde... With these four were seven Devils more evil than themselves. Eleven of them, all of them men or whatever of some age and authority.

'Finnegan was pleased... The old monsters would not be expecting an attack from a sixth floor window, not from an opponent they had not heard from in several years and who was not likely to be in that part of the world. Or would they? ...

'It was quite cold; and the mist was beginning to ice on the stones, making them dangerous, even for an ape-cat of a man...

'Finnegan had opened one window noiselessly and easily. He was a cat that could climb, he was an ape that could open anything. He left the opened window and moved dangerously and swiftly to the window the length of the room away. Both of these windows were sheer above the street.

'There was, however, in the side of the building (in the back of the room) a third window. Finnegan would not enter this, but he hoped to come out of it. Below this third window, and some nine feet out, was the roof of a four-story building.

'An animal on the surge does not consider. It strikes. Finnegan smashed the window in front of him with the lead weight, letting it fall heavily inside...

'Then one of them turned out the lights, and not with the wall switch. Look out! Someone was well-aware inside.

'Finnegan... came noiselessly into the room whose darkness was modified only by a slight neon ambient from outside.

'Two foci, neither of them to be seen in the dark, both of them to be remembered from observations of seconds before. Finnegan grappled the man where the man should have been , found him, and drove the knife into his throat, leaving it there. There was a death groan and a fall. And yet there was something the matter with that death groan...

'He leapt to the sill... and surged. He shattered that third window, crashing spread-eagled through it, leaping twenty feet down and nine feet outward. It would have killed a man to hit the way he hit on the edge of that roof.

'And there had been a wrong laugh in the dark room behind him just as he leaped.

'The man Finnegan was on a fourth floor roof, and there was gunshot behind him. So Finnegan was a man again; but a swift and sudden man who went quickly down the iron fire-ladders into an alley, and thought as swiftly as he could with his man's brain. But what he had just done he could not have done as a man. Only as the ape-cat that he had become when he climbed and invaded could have done it.

'Finnegan moved quickly, angling from alley into street and into another alley, abruptly into a cluttered space between buildings, through another alley, into another street. He was elated about one thing, disconsolate about another.

' "Got it! he exulted to himself. "But I killed the wrong man. Ah, well, I'll kill him yet. I'm a trick ahead of him now, even though it's his pursuit."'...

'Finnegan had little cuts about his face and hands. It was odd that one could go through a sheet of glass and receive only small cuts like that. The freezing rain had turned to a noisy sleet... it was necessary that he get off the street at once. A siren sounded, and it shook him, though he knew it could not be for him yet. A dog pursued him, noisily and relentlessly, and that could be more serious. A bum fastened onto him, and Finnegan gave him all his pocket change to be rid of him. A policeman bore down dourly on him, and Finnegan just as dourly continued past.'

A Travelogue of the Laffertian Landscape, part 3: The Ants of God are Queer Fish (And Walk Now Gently Through the Fire)

The next Lafferty story I happened upon was the 1972 ‘And Walk Now Gently Through the Fire’ which the dust jacket to the anthology of the same name somewhat misleadingly calls a ‘chilling dip into the occult’. It was weird; it was surprising; it was effortlessly (unintentionally I reckon!) original; it was tasty and tantalising; like everyone else testifies when they first read him, it was like nothing I’d ever read. And it was overtly Christian! Right here in the middle of other ‘sf masters’ (as the intro claimed, placing Lafferty’s name in their midst) such as Robert Bloch, Roger Silverberg, and Philip Hose Farmer was this wonderfully subversive story that was G. K. Chesterton writing a bizarre science-fictional Screwtape Letters for the freshly and giddily post-Christian, drugged-up, rock-n-roll-institutionalised America! The story begins:

‘The Ichthyans or Queer Fish are the oddest species to be found in any of the worlds.’

If you know where he’s going with it and what he means by it, this in some ways sums up Lafferty’s whole take on things. Already, I was enjoying the taste of the style and was open to an entertaining story about aliens. Anyway, the story continues:

‘They are pseudo-human, perhaps, but not android. The sign of the fish is not easily seen on them, and they pass as human whenever they wish: a peculiarity of them is that they often do not wish to pass as human even when their lives depend on it. They have blood in their veins, but an additional serum also. It is only when the organizational sickness is upon them (for these organizing and building proclivities they are sometimes known as the Queer Builders or the Ants of God), that they can really be told from humans. There is also the fact that most of them are very young, or at least of a youthful appearance. Their threat to us is more real than apparent and we tend to minimize it. This we must not do. In our unstructured, destructed, destroyed society, they must be counted as the enemies to be exterminated. It’s a double danger they offer us: to fight them on their own grounds, or to neglect to fight them. They’d almost trick us into organising to hunt down their organization.’

[Those who know VOTM will see the blatant influence on my lyrics – ok, plagiarism on my part!]
So, this is not a story about aliens after all. Not conventionally anyway. This is a poker-faced but laughing-eyed, satirical but deadly serious tract for the times, and for those with eyes to see it, a ‘religious’ tract at that! And it was couched in freshly self-ironic yet taunting terms like ‘Queer Fish’ and ‘Ants of God’! I was suddenly wide awake and fully engaged, grim-browed and glint-eyed, bent on seeing just where this was going.

Here I face a narrative problem. I want to quote half the story! It deserves a lengthy chapter all to itself in some critical book! So I deem. Let me just try to point out a few more things about this story so as to end this entry and move on to the rest of my Laffertian journey and to thoughts on his wider work.

This opening to the story is one of a handful of something like excerpts from a professional scholarly journal that punctuate the story (a trope Lafferty often uses). At first the ‘scholars’ sound like scary bureaucratic social architects but slowly their identity morphs into demonic personages writing about the much-needed extermination of these pesky Queer Fish and all they stand for. (Hence the Screwtape Letters comparison above.) But immediately it moves on to proper storytelling as well:

‘Judy Thatcher was moving upcountry in a cover of cattle.’

Need I say more? Nobody writes like that! A ‘cover of cattle’? Come on! If that’s not totally awesome I just don’t know what is. This is Lafferty’s Oklahoman/Iowan uncool ‘coolness’. I’m from Indiana, not either of the coasts, so maybe that’s why I get it. But I’m pretty sure I’ve heard plenty of voices from East and West coasts that chime in with approval. Even some Brits. Definitely the Japanese seem to love him. (When you read more Lafferty and watch, say, Japanese animated films, you can probably see quite readily why.)

The cattle are further described as ‘wobble-eyed and unordered’ which is a condition we eventually see has afflicted every living thing on the planet except the birds and the few and scattered Queer Fish. Who’s Judy Thatcher?

‘Judy was a young and handsome woman of rowdy intellect. She had, by special arrangement, two eyes outside of her head, and these now travelled on the two horizons. These eyes were her daughter, travelling now about two miles to the East and right of her on a ridge, and her son moving on another ridge three miles to her left and West. She was a plague carrier, she and hers. All three of them were Queer Fish.’

This is a Chestertonian Hemingway or Steinbeck (or maybe even Louis L’Amour)! But no, it’s Lafferty. Some people seem to get tired of hearing it, but he’s truly one of a kind. (S.f. scholar John Clute: ‘With R. A. Lafferty… comparisons are more than usually misleading. He stood alone.’) Still, approximate and tentative and even facetiously tenuous comparisons can’t hurt. I actually think Laff himself, in describing his own characters or in comments they make, gives us the vocabulary we need to delineate his style. A ‘rowdy intellect’ is one of many such descriptives that captures well the man’s mind. In fact, he later describes Judy writing a letter ‘with great sweeps of writing in a rowdy hand out of a rowdy mind… Yet she wrote with difficulty, for all the free-handed sweep of her writing. There are things hard to write, there are things impossible. She dipped her calamari pen in lampblack and in grace and wrote to somebody or something that might no longer be in existence.’

Bang! There it is for sure. This is Lafferty’s writing very well described indeed and we shall return to this thought in a later entry. But for now just know that he’s a rowdy, sweeping, grace-dipped intellectual of a writer writing things hard to write, and things impossible, perhaps written to someone or something now extinct. If that doesn’t make you hurt inside with a good hurt, sad inside with a good sadness, pierced inside with sweet aching joy, roused inside with glee and grit, well, friend, read on and pray for grace!

Judy’s juvenile son Gregory is presently tempted by a junior demon called Azazel and they’re both a bit embarrassed by it because it’s both of theirs first time and they end up laughing it off a bit. But Gregory does successfully resist temptation in the end and the demon departs a bit miffed, promising ‘The show isn’t over with boy’.

It’s just this sort of matter-of-fact and rather irreverent theological supernaturalism seamlessly woven into his stories that characterises Lafferty’s genius for being theologically orthodox in a contemporarily heterodox manner. That’s why so many non-Christians read him and don’t know whether he’s comin’ or goin’! Whatever pre-beliefs we bring to it, we just eat it up. Why not? Something this good can’t be all bad, can it? I honestly feel sorry for atheists and other ‘unbelievers’ who read Lafferty with pleasure. They must feel so guiltily tempted toward the (to them) dark side! As C. S. Lewis said, ‘a young atheist can’t be too careful what he reads’! Nor can any non-Christian of any age for that matter! I know not everyone sees these theological underpinnings right away. As the aforementioned Encyclopedia of SF notes: Lafferty’s ‘conservative Catholicism has been seen as permeating every word he writes (or has been ignored)’. But I wonder whether readers can really understand or even truly enjoy Laff’s work without coming to some kind of terms with his faith. Again, Clute: ‘unlike almost anyone else in the field, his Roman Catholicism governed not only the surface of his work, but its deep structure as well.’ More on that in later entries. Suffice it to say the dialectic he sets up in the following two paragraphs from later in this story should make the stakes pretty clear:

‘There has been a long series of “Arrow Men” or “Beshot Men” who have been called (or who have called themselves) Sons of God. These Comet-like Men have all been exceptional in their brief periods. The Queer Fish, however, insist that their own particular Mentor “The Mysterious Master and Maker of the Worlds” was unique and apart and beyond the other Arrow men or Comet Men who have been called Sons of God. They state that he is more than Son of God: that He is God the Son.’

But what we’re reading here is another of the demonic-bureaucratic journal entries and it goes on to argue the other side:

‘We do not acknowledge this uniqueness, but we do acknowledge the splendor and destroying brilliance of all these Arrow Men. To us, there is nothing wrong with the term Son of God. There is not even anything wrong with the term God, so long as it is understood to be meaningless, so long as we take him to be an unstructured God. Our own splendor would have been less if there had not been some huge thing there which we unstructured. This unstructuring of God, which we have accomplished, was the greatest masterwork of man.
‘The second greatest masterwork of man was the unstructuring of man himself, the ceasing to be man, the going into the hole and pulling the hole in after him; and the unstructuring, the destroying of the very hole then.’

Hmm… Lafferty seems to be taking us to the future in order to see our present times. Then the devil-scholars show their hand:

‘We who were made of fire were asked to serve and salute those who were made of clay. We had been Arrow Men ourselves. Our flight was long flaming and downward, and now it has come to an end. We destroy ourselves also. We’ll be no more. It is the Being that we have always objected to.’

And this is their sinister-sweet invitation to us all:

‘What, have you not lusted for rotted mind and for rotted meat? Here are aphrodisiacs to aid you. Have you not lusted for unconsciousness and oblivion? You can have them both, so long as you accept them as rotted, which is the same as disordered, or unstructured, or uninstituted. This is the peaceful end of it all: the disordering, the disintegrating, the unstructuring, the rotting, the dry rot which is without issue, the nightmare which is the name of sleep without structure. Lust and lust again for this end! We offer you, while it is necessary, the means and the aids to it.’

Well, it’s ominous to be sure, yet the story ends on an achingly transcendent note, bizarre and completely without banality or cheese or hoaky religiosity. Not a false note is rung. But that’s for a future entry!

Next: I encounter another story, belly-achingly humorous, and find myself hooked for good. The search begins.

A Travelogue of the Laffertian Landscape, part 2: Closing in on the Mad Man Riding (Raucously) the Crest of the New Wave

In my early 20s I discovered science fiction as literature through C. S. Lewis’s ‘Space Trilogy’ (‘Cosmic Trilogy’ in UK) and in my nerdish obsessive tendency proceeded to read s.f. non-stop for 2 or 3 years.

Now I had grown up on sci-fi films and TV and loved the genre, but books-wise had only read fantasy and horror as a child and teen. Furthermore, I was ‘singing’ in a ‘sci-fi/horror’ punk rock band at the time (Blaster the Rocket Boy, later Blaster the Rocket Man). My childhood imagination had readily poured out in my lyrics along with my young-adulthood faith, so that our songs were a strange and heady mix of the spiritual experiences of monsters and robots and aliens. I was a huge C. S. Lewis fan (reading his Mere Christianity at age 18 genuinely changed my whole life, especially by finally fully switching on my intellect and effectively and thrillingly meshing it with my imagination and faith) and I was writing science-fictional lyrics from a Christian worldview but still hadn’t read his science fiction books! A dear friend finally posted me the books in the mail and prompted me to read them, which yet again changed my life.

I must admit, though, I look back on those 2 or 3 years of slavish voracious s.f. reading with some nausea. It was mostly tripe, sadly (I wasted some precious hours of my life on the revered Asimov – but bless him, he’s a classic in his way and is still highly pleasurable in the rare story—reading ‘The Bicentennial Man’ aloud to my children was a fine moment).

However, I think what I mostly identified with then (and still do sometimes) was a phase in s.f. history called the ‘new wave’ in the 1960s and 70s. The hotties of this loose grouping were Roger Zelazny, Samuel R. Delany, and Harlan Ellison in America (gotta love those names!). Apparently it was Brits like Brian Aldiss and J. G. Ballard that started the literary trend in this experimental direction. Philip K. Dick would go here as well and I’m sure there are others I’m glaringly overlooking. It was particularly some of the feel from Ellison and Zelazny that grabbed me, and even more so Aldiss drew me into his flame for a period. There was a quirkiness and ‘coolness’ and ‘science fantasy’ (in the good way) feel to the Americans. Aldiss had their oddity but with the much more articulate and patently intellectual tone usually ingrained in British writing (which for most of my life I by far preferred – I’ve now come to appreciate quite acutely the American style of intelligent prose as well).

In this period (the 60s/70s, as well as my phase of reading this work, which was the mid-90s) there emerged another American author that surely by default of name had to align with this grouping: one R. A. Lafferty. Initially he has the same quirky feel (not as ‘cool’ though, the first thing to set him apart), the oddity, the wry wit and wisdom. Indeed, all of the aforementioned authors praised Lafferty without exception or qualification. Here’s what they were saying about his first (and most well known) novel, Past Master, in 1968 (a novel I didn’t read until much later in my Lafferty experience).

You can hear the genuine admiration mixed with bemusement about how to praise a genius even stranger than themselves who had popped up in their midst:

I read it in one sitting; I couldn’t put it down. Lafferty has the power which sets fires behind your eyeballs. There is warmth, illumination, and a certain joy attendant upon the experience. He’s good. [Roger Zelazny]

This is a great galloping madman of a novel, drenched in sound and color… As with everything the man writes, the wind of imagination blows strongly… and we can settle back to appreciate the special magic proffered by the madman Lafferty. [Harlan Ellison]

The Lafferty madness… is peppered with nightmare: witches, lazarus-lions, hydras, porsche’s-panthers, programmed killers that never fail, and a burlesqued black mass. One hears of black comedy? There are places in PAST MASTER where humor goes positively ultraviolet. [Samuel R. Delany]

…wild, subtle, demonic, angelic, hilarious, tragic, poetic, a thundering melodrama and a quest into the depths of the human spirit… R. A. Lafferty has always been uniquely his own man. [Poul Anderson]

It’s a minor miracle that a serious philosophical and speculative work should be written so colorfully and so lyrically. There is, happily, no way to categorize the book: it has elements of science fiction, of pure fantasy, of poetry, of historical fiction; it is sharply critical and marvellously gentle; very serious and irrepressibly funny; profoundly symbolic and gutsy-realistic by (unexpected) turns. A first rate speculative work. [Judith Merril]

Yet he transcends his peers, he transcends. I don’t mean to be patronizing to clearly great writers who went on to much more renown than Lafferty ever knew. But I think even they knew they were in the presence of someone truly in a league of his own, even if that distinction pushed him into the realm of the ‘mad’ and ‘wild’ like an animal-skinned prophet in the desert.

I first happened upon one or two of his stories in old s.f. mags I had collected second hand and certainly the name stuck if no other impression was made. (I do remember the ending of a story I was otherwise not impressed with, something about a witch making a chilli recipe, that totally made my heart thud against its cage with painful yearning – it utterly surprised me, but it didn’t yet shock me out of my stupidity for I didn’t at that time take up the quest for more Lafferty.) Then I came across the entry on Lafferty in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (edited by the brilliant scholar John Clute). Yes, I know, it’s utterly geeky to own such a tome, but honestly it’s actually high quality lit. crit.! I bought the encyclopaedia in the heat and height of an obsession for ‘Inklings’ style imaginative literature when I noticed it had interesting lengthy entries on all three (Williams, Lewis, Tolkien as well as predecessors Chesterton and MacDonald)! Anyway, it mentioned that Lafferty’s Roman Catholicism infused all his writing and I was intrigued on that count. Theologically driven s.f. is rare indeed (particularly by Christians), but is perhaps the most precious jewel worth digging up and collecting. And if you’re gonna dig, dig Lafferty!

Next: I properly encounter my first Lafferty story. It takes a minute to say, so please forgive the long entry…

A Travelogue of the Laffertian Landscape, part 1 – How to Be a Joyously Subversive Blessing Instead of a Hackneyed Subcultural Blight

R. A. Lafferty is a truly great, largely unknown author who deserves the ‘devotion’, attention, and thoughtful reflection. That alone makes this series worth it. These are very early days indeed for Lafferty criticism, so we’re far, far from having too much written about him.

These entries are also incidentally and unavoidably autobiographical and hence at times insightful into my mind, for those interested (you sick people!). (I assume this will mainly be ‘fans’ of Blaster the Rocket Man and Voice of the Mysterons. But some friends, co-workers, neighbours, and family members may also benefit in better understanding their weird half-overbearing, half-reclusive, alternately affable and recalcitrant, bearded bespectacled acquaintance. On the other hand, it may confirm your fears and suspicions and rouse you to unite and take up your torches and pitchforks to finally rid the village of the vile fiend!)

Furthermore, and very importantly, to write about Lafferty is, for me, necessarily a socio-cultural commentary/exploration on a ‘way forward’ for Christian artists: how to be a joyously subversive blessing instead of a hackneyed subcultural blight.

Christians have a long history of being profound and provocative culture-makers: I mainly think of literary innovators like Edmund Spenser, George Herbert, John Bunyan, John Milton, George MacDonald, G. K. Chesterton, Charles Williams, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, and Gene Wolfe (just to name a few that spring to mind). In modern/postmodern/post-postmodern times this tradition is largely lost within huge swathes of the broad Christian church. Hearing comments (from critics who did not share Lafferty’s faith) like the below about an artist who is a self-professed ‘public’ Christian gives me conviction and hope and… ideas:

R. A. Lafferty is one of the most original writers in science fiction. He bends or breaks normal story restrictions apparently at will, pokes fun at serious matters and breaks into a kind of folk-lyricism over grotesqueries. All this, plus the most unfettered imagination we’ve enjoyed in years. [Terry Carr]

R. A. Lafferty is possessed—a madman, a wild talent… Lafferty’s world is not always comfortable, since he takes particular delight in subtly twisting the meanings of words. His world is usually delightfully absurdist, and often bristling with pins to prick the soap-bubbles of whatever you hold sacred. Lafferty is fun, sophisticated, and utterly insane. [A Reader’s Guide to SF]
Too often the label ‘Christian’ in many people’s minds cannot go in the same category as ‘original’, ‘breaking normal restrictions’, ‘fun’, ‘grotesque’, ‘unfettered imagination’, ‘mad/insane’, ‘wild’, ‘subtle’, ‘twisting’, ‘delightful’, ‘absurd’, ‘bursting sacred bubbles’, ‘sophisticated’, etc. Admittedly, a Christian embodies many of these descriptors only in certain senses and sometimes in ways that are dangerous and/or hilarious. But to fail to live out the connections between Christian history, experience, and belief and these ‘edgy’, unconventional signifiers is to sell out the true story of what this social, cultural, philosophical, ‘religious’ revolution called Christianity is all about. The faith’s origins (to say nothing of the faith’s Founder) are, historically, nothing if not in some ways well described by the adjectives above. Look into it if you doubt me.

You see, Christian Orthodoxy is frankly unorthodox. Art created from a community soaked in this tradition and trajectory simply must reflect this untameable character or else inherently deny the soil it grew in and show itself to really be the product of some more arid agriculture.

Not all my readers will readily appreciate this ‘faith and art’ element in the entries to follow. But the discussion is by no means limited to this; it is simply an inevitable component of the larger investigation into Lafferty’s work. I think anyone from any pre-commitment can enjoy and benefit from an honest assessment of the work of such a great author. (It is worth noting that we all exercise ‘faith’, not just ‘religious’ types. We all have unprovable ‘ultimate commitments’ [just name yours and then try to prove them] which we may have good or bad or no reasons for trusting, but we do trust them nevertheless. They are discussable, testable, alterable – but they are finally matters of an act of faith. I hope you can see that this is the case. Obviously, please feel free to argue to the contrary.)

Next: my personal story of discovering Lafferty.