More Than Melchisedech

by R. A. Lafferty

  ‘I told Oriebates that if she couldn't do better than that, why hell, I'd get Mary Newshee out of the popcorn booth to play it. The Star and Garter had already been sold when this happened, and Mary Newsbee was married and living on Walnut Street downtown; but that didn't seem to be the case in the episode. It was not a dream though. It was a detached experience.

  ‘What puzzles me was that Duffey knows so little about such things at first hand. But he catches on fast. He pirates minds and gets the stuff out of them and pretends that he knew it all the time, That Maker Man, he just doesn't have it.’

  [Teresa Piccone Stranahan. Private Letter.]

  ‘Showboat wrote that? How did she know that Finnegan was a ghost? He is, though. But Finnegan and Showboat were not lovers ever. Their intimacy was of another sort. Finnegan was likely not a real lover of anyone ever, unless he could find another Teras to carry on with. With me, he was a ghost-lover. Well, am I a fornicator thereby? Not I. Ours was not a thing that can be put into flesh, nor into words.

  ‘Of the adventures, oh, I was on all the original adventures myself! I was one of the Argo Company, yes, but the ‘Adventures’ were variants. I know what Finnegan told me, what X told me, what Melchisedech told me. There are some of the identities that haven't properly been unraveled though. One of the Papadiabouloi was the same person as the Private Gregory in that hospital ward in the Philippines. How many persons in the world can be expected to have such great purple pumpkins for heads?

  ‘Teresa is an analog to Anastasia Demetriades, but she resented Anastasia. She rejoiced privately when Anastasia died. I am the same person as Doll Delancy, according to the account of X, but Doll wasn't too much according to other accounts. She was like myself, but with the brains knocked out.

  ‘As to Melchisedech Duffey, at rare times he becomes identical with every one of his creations. I have felt him in myself as myself. It isn't simply that he's a robber of minds, for he's a bit more. Whether or not he is our maker, he is our awakener and our mentor.

  !How odd of God

  To puff the Duff!

  ‘We are a mutually creative group of about thirteen people. God sets such groups according to whim, and to prevent elitism from creeping in. That's why there's a Duffey-type at the head of every group  —  to teach humility. We are all about one-thirteenth Duffey. We think about that whenever we are inclined to be thunderstruck by our own genius. In any random company of a dozen or so persons, one or two of them will be already dead, but with no real division between. Do the dead know that they are dead and in purgatory? Or rather, do we know whether we are dead or not? Whether we are in the flesh or not? Whether we are in the world or not?

  ‘We were given Finnegan because he was part Teras, so all of us will be part Teras through him. This keeps us from being overly proud of being human. All who have dealt with Finnegan have acquired a rich intellectual stratum that rests somewhere between the conscious and the unconscious. This stratum can't be brought out. It can't be displayed. It can't be examined on any terms except its own. It melts away, and sometimes one fears that it is lost. Finnegan expresses part of this west-of-the-moon intellect in his paintings. But all his paintings fly away to obscure collections, since we cannot afford to own them for long. He expresses part of it in his words, but his words can never be recalled when he isn't present. Finn says that this inaccessibility comes from his having Teras brains and we having people brains. All of them, Casey and Henri and Hans and Absalom, pass themselves off as being smart by cashing in a little bit of the hoard that Finnegan bestows on us. Finnegan was the most talented and intelligent man anywhere in spite of his ape-brained vagaries and antics. He was my beloved forever, and he was Duffey's Central Creation. Well, back to rebuilding the world.

  [Dotty Yekouris. Unmailed Letter, no addressee given.]

  ‘It is a continuing mystery how a very small group, usually less than a dozen persons, has been able to save the world from destruction for several decades now. We have been doing exactly that, but the margin becomes closer and closer.

  [Mary Virginia Schaeffer]

  2

  Now it is into the New Orleans Scene, in the time-defying stasis of Duffey, which moves back and forth through the years. But, in those first two weeks or so, before Finnegan flew the coop that first time, the scene wasn't quite in stasis yet.

  Duffey and Finnegan and a man named Zabotski who owned the building were working one morning very early. It was the fourth or fifth morning dating from the founding of the Pelican Press in New Orleans. Early morning, yes, it had just struck midnight on the little wooden clock that Zabotski himself had made. The instituting of the Pelican Press was for the publishing of a journal called The Bark for the renewal of the world, and for the publishing of other things also.

  Zabotski was a gross and sometimes even an unpleasant man, but he was a fine artist. This combination is frequent. Zabotski was an ethnic artist. The art of the Philistines is the most enduring and the most underrated of all the ethnic arts. And Zabotski liked to busy himself at all hours, and he was a very sociable man. Such hyperactive and socializing inclinations are often found in completely useless people. But Zabotski owned the building, and he considered that he had certain rights of entry.

  Duffey and Finnegan and Zabotski were rebuilding and reappointing a large room there: it would be the press room, and it would be the everything room. And, at the same time that Duffey was doing this, he was also making a recorder flute. And Finnegan, while working on the rebuilding of the room, was also painting a large picture. Actually, in their own ways, they were about the business of rebuilding the world.

  Duffey would also have his ‘Walk-In Art Bijou’ as well as his pawn shop in this building.

  The recorder, a musical instrument, an old type of flute such as had been made and played back in mid-millennium, was being put together out of walnut wood and Philippine mahogany. The stop-keys and filigree were being made out of bright brass. Since he had made his first banjo, Duffey had held in contempt all persons who play on instruments that they haven't made themselves. And the newest of Duffey's tall dreams was for a flute band to give an occasional alternative to the string band that he had found already thriving there in the neighborhood and had joined.

  “There was a report on the radio, on the ‘Late, Late, Late News That Was Different’, about a prisoner being released in the Crimea last Saturday,” Duffey said. “It got comic treatment. What else could it get? But it confirms some of the things that Henri and Absalom and others (myself, for instance) have been saying.”

  The picture that Finnegan was painting was a horizontal eight feet by four feet piece, and it was in the Finnegan ‘Yellow Period’ style. There was a leaping sophistication in its handling, but it handled primitive materials, ice-age animals and cave-man settings.

  “I get my own reports from the Old Country,” Zabotski said. “This isn't entirely comic, though there has always been a folk-comic element in tales of the Chort. This story is a simple one. The Devil was released from the underground dungeon which many people did not know underlay the peninsula. He came out of there light-blinded but in possession of most of his faculties. He stretched himself to a great height. He got ten kilos of balm from a pharmacy and rubbed it on the galls that had been made by the irons on his neck and wrists and ankles. He gave cryptic answers to reporters. ‘What would you say would be the most important effect of your release?’ a reporter asked. ‘They shall know it, now that I have returned,’ the Devil quoted. ‘Wasn't it Achilles who said that first?’ the reporter inquired. ‘No, I said it first, a long time ago’, the Devil said. ‘He may have had it from me. I have the lever and the hammer boys. You will give me a good press, or you will run into the worst difficulties that you ever thought of. ‘Whenever did you not get a good press, since there has been a press?’ one of the reporters said. ‘That's true’, the Devil admitted. Let's keep it that way.’ I should have quite a few more details of it soon. A cousin of mine was present and
witnessed it all.”

  “Ah, I'm afraid that we will know it, now that he is back.”

  “Where do you have your reports from?” Duffey asked.

  “Oh, from my own radio. But it's a wireless that is literally without wires, and that speaks only to Slavic ears, and not to all of them. Cut me one more stud to the length of those others, Finnegan.”

  Finnegan sawed another stud of seven feet and one and one quarter inches. Finnegan did not measure and he did not square, but he cut to perfect fit. This was because he was an artist. For the first of the studs, he had measured the distance with his eye, and he had got it right. For the others, as Zabotski called for them, he cut them without looking. Why not? He had already looked. Does an artist have to look twice?

  “Finnegan, I will hate you for that forever,” Duffey said, “and I will hate you for accepting it without blinking, Zabotski. You are working rule-free and not by jot and tittle. I was once the best carpenter in St. Louis, and I am still one of the nine great carpenters in the world, but I always measure carefully. My wife was starting down from Chicago this morning, with a surplus army four-by-four truck with all our possessions not otherwise stored. My wife has never seen either of you, except through my mind and at a distance of hundreds of miles, but she has you both sized up perfectly. ‘Tell that Zabotski that he had better lose fifty pounds,’ she writes ‘between the eyes’.”

  “I exercise up there constantly,” Zabotski said. “There's a little fat there, I suppose, but oh the great extent and depth of fine and lean brains too! What does that second reindeer say, Finnegan? Oh, yes, I get it now.”

  Sometimes Zabotski stuck his huge hands into Duffey's flutemaking, but it was hard to fault him there. He was good with both wood and brass. He had brought some of his own equipment from next door, a small furnace (they would need it anyhow for making and repairing many parts for the press), a lathe, a mortising machine, a wood-turners’ outfit, a brass-smelting arrangement with small drop-hammers.

  And sometimes Zabotski stuck his big hands into the picture that Finnegan was painting, spreading globs of impossible pigment with a palette knife, and making possible some effects that even Finnegan had hesitated over.

  But should people whose purpose was the rebuilding of the world be taking time out for picture-painting and flute-making? They should, yes. You'll never build a world right without such things.

  “Here it will make a difference in the color,” Zabotski said. “The purpose will make a difference. Why are you painting the picture, Finnegan?”

  “This one was for money. It will go to a fraternity house where they should be smart enough to catch the lines. Dotty says that we will need quite a bit of money to get things rolling.”

  “Oh, for money. Then it is this way.” And Zabotski caused an effect that would enhance the money value. Zabotski knew all about the enhancing of money. It was no wonder that Zabotski was an artist, or that Finnegan was. Almost everybody in that block was an artist. There are not three brocks in all of New Orleans with more artists living in them. Zabotski wouldn't have rented that building to Dotty and Duffey and their bunch if there hadn't been an artist, Finnegan, among them. And Zabotski, as one of the foremost Philistine artists in the world, had high standing in the art colonies. “Why are there so many ungainly butterflies and birds hovering about the mouths of the animals and people in your painting, Finnegan?” Duffey asked. “And what is the complicated figuration of the fur and hair of the animals?”

  “Oh poor rotten Duffey!” Finnegan cried in amazement. “That's talk, Duffey, talk. Don't you know talk, don't you know words and statements when you see them? Do you know that lepidopterists have discerned a whole branch of Pleistocene lepidoptera rock paintings of Chamonix and St. Zermatto and Guebwiller? But the lepidopterists are mistaken in their own specialty. Those supposed butterflies around the mouths of people and animals in the rock paintings aren't butterflies at all.”

  “What are they then, Neanderthal Artist Finnegan?” Duffey wanted to know.

  “Balloons,” Finnegan said. “They are cartoonist-style, speech-and-song balloons. They are the words and the statements coming out of the mouths of the people and beasts. They are all in the original and complex language.”

  “You lie, Finnegan,” Duffey said recklessly, and he left his flute-making for a while to put up a cranky little shelf in the rebuilding structure of the room. “I know that the cave and wall paintings at St. Zermatto and Chaminix and Guebwiller were all done by Neanderthal men. And the Neanderthals had neither speech nor writing.”

  “Oh Holozoic Hell, Duffey! Of course we had them, and we have them yet!” Finnegan exploded. “These birds and butterflies, on the cave paintings and the wall paintings, and on my painting on canvas here, are message blurbs being spoken by the creatures. They look more ornate than do contemporary cartoonists' balloons because we used to write on both the inside and the outside of the balloon. No, they aren't butterflies, and they aren't birds. They are words and sentences of written commentary. And you, Duffey, are left on the outside. You don't even know what the second reindeer answered the first. Even Zabotski caught that one finally. This is rich language that we use in our paintings. Language began in complexity and perfection, and then it degenerated into our present simplicity and poverty.”

  “You don't even know the meaning of poverty,” Duffey said. “Not in this, not in anything. The lack of comprehension of poverty is at the root of so many of our troubles. Certain degenerate and evil persons have begun a ‘war on poverty’. They are the same persons who relentlessly wage the ‘war on obedience’ and the ‘war on chastity’. Waging a war on poverty is like waging a war on life or on goodness. Pay attention. This is a Duffey Lecture. It will not be repeated.”

  “Of course it will be repeated, many times,” Finnegan said.

  “There is something wrong with an economic and social system that cannot generate real poverty,” Duffey stated, “when poverty is unblessed and no longer to be found, then the whole world comes unblessed. We will pray for holy poverty, and we will hardly find it. This lack of poverty imperils the Great Pot itself.”

  “Maybe the Devil will bring back poverty, now that he was released,” Finn said.

  “The Devil? What should he have to do with Holy Poverty other than to defame it?” Duffey asked, “and that is what he will do. In the years to come, you will hear endless defamations of poverty. You will hear it maligned and cursed; you will hear it slandered and classed as an evil. You will even hear ‘cures’ proposed for it. Some of these cures will be proposed by persons really wanting to find cures for various degradations which they miscall poverty. But also, there will be absolute and violent attacks on poverty itself. Look closely at the people who mount these attacks. They may be the most distinguished of senators and bishops and mouth-brokers and enterprising and diligent self-servers. They may be the fashionable Judas Priests and accommodations-persons. These things they may be on the surface, but underneath they are devils, every one of them.”

  “Duffey, I've known poverty,” Zabotski said. “It has rough edges.”

  “It's just that you're not holy enough to see it clearly, Zabotski, and you may be calling other things by its holy name. The Devil, more than ever now, will be bringing in things to be called ‘poverty’ by the ignorant: sordidness, trashiness, degradation, debasement, deprivation, animality, certain of the deliriums, squalidness, shabbiness of spirit, debauchery, barrenness, hopelessness. But there is no way that the Devil can bring back Holy Poverty to us.

  “There remains one solution to all economic and social and personal ills, to all the traumas caused by sin and false poverty: ‘Ask and you shall receive’. That takes care of everything. There is no case of persons asking in good faith and not receiving, and the Lord promises that there will not be. There are so many persons who would like to find blessing in true giving, and so few who are available for the receiving. What if the Pot stands full forever, and nobody will ask for its Hol
y Slumgullion?

  “Oh, you win, guys,” Duffey said then, turning to the Finnegan picture. “Some days I really am dim. I caught it finally.”

  “Caught what, old Duff?” Finnegan asked him.

  “What the second reindeer answered to the first reindeer in your painting. It's pretty good.”

  The Great Pot Itself was an intimate part of ‘Project Rebuilding the World’. This project began with that fat-to-overflowing, young, Louisiana-swamp Frenchman, Henri or Henry Salvatore. (Where his name was given ‘Henri’ it was pronounced ‘Onree’ in the Cajun fashion; where it was given ‘Henry’ it was pronounced ‘Henry’.) Salvatore had once had a maritime vision and heard a salt-spray voice telling him that his was the responsibility of rebuilding the world. Henri didn't know how to do it, but he did have a talent for delegating assignments. He delegated the Rebuilding of the World to Finnegan, to Duffey, to Stein, to Mary Virginia, to Dotty, to those first and mainly. Then he went off to a place where they were supposed to teach the rebuilding-of-the-world trade. (He then became to all of them ‘Henry the Merry Monk” though he intended to become a secular priest.) Those to whom he gave the assignments, to work until he should come back, didn't know how to rebuild the world either. But each of them had several little catch-notions of it that might serve until a better idea came along. Among the notions were ‘A Journal’, ‘An Institute’, and ‘A Pot’.

  The Pot belonged to Zabotski. Zeb had once been a chemist or experimenter of some sort, and he had used this big, glass-lined, one-thousand-gallon capacity pot or crock for some distillation experiments. Duffey asked for it, and Zabotski knocked out a section of the wall and brought it into the big room.