Summa Risus: Collected Non-Fiction

by R. A. Lafferty

  The fascination of the tales about space travel echoes the times when we really could travel through deep space effortlessly, instantly, and without vehicles.

  The fascination of designing new fantasy worlds echoes the time when our own world was new for an immeasurable period of time, when it had a million different aspects and could present a different one every minute.

  The fascination of new inventions echoes the time when to think was to invent, when to conceive was to construct with no interval at all in between, the time when man was given dominion over all the world.

  The fascination with ecological fantasies echoes the time when the lion really did lie down with the lamb and eat straw like an ox, when it had not yet rained in the world but “…a mist rose from the Earth and watered all the surface of the ground.”

  Once we were a more intricate species than we are now.

  Once time stood still when we ordered it to do so.

  Once we had the Midas Touch, the transmuting touch.

  Once we could walk through walls, or walk on water.

  Once we could move mountains.

  All these things remain as normal but occluded powers of mankind, as true attributes of mankind. But humankind came to an abnormal situation and place, to the narrow isthmus of the middle state where the full normal powers are inhibited.

  Who are we really, we who could normally do all those things? Who we are is part of the answer to the riddle.

  How did we get onto the isthmus? We fell onto it.

  How do we get off of this isthmus? We solve the riddles, or we accept the solutions that stand ready and waiting. Then we discover that we are already off the isthmus.

  The implausibility of almost every Science Fiction or Fantasy story lies in the answer to the riddle being readily available, and not being grasped.

  The real difficulty is that we have looked back, not at the ‘first state of magic’, but at the isthmus of the middle state where magic is forbidden. And in looking back we are turned into pillars of salt.

  But even that need not be fatal. Remember that once we could turn into anything at all, and then turn back again. We have already left the uninspiring isthmus or we could not be looking back at it.

  Is this that I have just written no more than a very poor Science Fiction story in the guise of an article? Very likely it is. And yet, very poor story that it may be, it is the synopsis of ‘The Only True History of the World and of the Lords of the World’.

  Once we were indeed Lords of the World because we were at one with the world. Once time stood still when we ordered it to do so. It still does.

  Once we had the Transmuting Touch. We have it yet.

  Once we could walk through walls. We can still do it, if we disregard the caveat of the skeptic who says “When you've walked through one wall you've walked through them all.”

  Once we could move mountains. Haven't you heard the Good News? We can still move them.

  Who are we who can do all these things, except that we have half-forgotten that we can do them?

  There is one good Science Fiction story that I haven't gotten around to writing. It's about the hero-adventurer who answered all the ten thousand riddles except one, and each one was more difficult than the one before it. He answered all of them except the final one, which had also been the one before the first one. No wonder it sounded familiar! That question which stopped him was and remains:

  “What is your own name?”

  If he can answer that last question, then he can win all the prizes there are. Why does he hesitate when it is so easy?

  March 21 , 1980

  Through The Red Fire

  or

  The Hidden Truths About Story-Tellers Dredged Up From The Unconscious Of One Of Them

  We will now answer two questions:

  Why are all story-tellers so funny-looking?

  Why has the art of story-telling declined so abysmally?

  The art of story-telling has not been declining from the beginning. It has been declining for only about twelve thousand years. One reason for the decline is a dietary deficiency: the scarcity of Wooly Rhinoceros Meat and of Dire Wolf Meat. And the other reason is the disappearance of good places where good stories may be told.

  Story-tellers are not made. They are born. For a thousand generations they are born. And, compared to regular people, story-tellers are funny-looking when stretched over such heads. Story-tellers are clumsy. And they are stumble-tongued and stumble-brained at the beginning of everything that they do. Moreover, they have red bones. They are of the ‘Old People’. Story-tellers have never belonged to the race to whom they tell the stories.

  The cave, with a good red fire in the entrance of it, with about twenty-three people inside it at the fall of night, with supper of charred meat and lentils and pounded root bread just eaten, with each person wrapped in his bear skin, that was the original setting for the story hour (almost exactly an hour) between the ending of supper and the coming of ‘Sleep’, an amorphous and ghostly person, through the red fire. In that proper setting, and with the story-teller a member of the ‘Old People’, there was no way that a story could not be a good one. And then this genuine setting had to give way to artificial settings.

  After the change began, the not-quite-so-good stories were told in artificial caves (they might be cottages or manor houses or even castles) with their small hearths or their giant fireplaces. Or they were told across camp fires in the open night. The best of the stories were still told by the ‘red-bone minstrels’ who were ‘Men of the Old People’. The stories of these times, though not-quite-so-good, were not bad at all.

  But when the settings became still finer, when the salons arrived, the stories fell onto evil days. Gossip and not stories was told in the salons, and the ‘red-bones’ were not needed for gossip. Stories still held on in taverns and inns and pubs, in coffee houses and clubs, in poorhouses and prisons (until they changed from great ‘common rooms’ to cell blocks), in the galleys of ships, and in the ‘long houses’ of slave plantations.

  Then even these ‘second generation’ good-story-telling-places were destroyed. The taverns and pubs were destroyed by the music-boxes in them. The cottages and manors and castles and palaces had their special story places destroyed by political discussions that moved into them, and then by radio and television. And, in the meanwhile, printing had turned all story-telling into secondary story-telling. So now all stories became several steps removed from original stories.

  At trivial meetings I have even heard writers read their own written works out loud. There is something very wrong and displaced about that. It is that evil thing, the unfunny caricature.

  What to do about it though? What to do about it?

  Bring back the caves! Bring back the Ice Ages! Bring back the ‘Old People’, ‘The People Who Were Before the People’, ‘The People From the Moon’, ‘The Red-Boned People’. The ice is very important. When the ice went, half the stories went with it.

  Back in the Ice Ages, what could you do during a thirty-thousand-year-long winter other than beget children and tell stories? Oh yes, you could paint pictures on the cave walls with bear-grease-based pigments, or you could whittle little ornaments out of wood or reindeer bone, or you could make whistles from the wing-bones of birds and blow them. Never since then have the arts played so large a part in life. And story-telling was the central art.

  The Neanderthal Men, called the ‘Old People’ and the ‘Red-Boned People’, and ‘The People of the Moon’ (because of their funny-shaped heads like that of the man-in-the-moon when the moon is full) were, and they still are, the story-tellers, but few of them today are of unmixed blood. These ‘Old People’ are always stumble-tongued when they first begin to talk, as if unsure of which of their tongues they should use. But once started they will narrate with dark fluency.

  The Neanderthals understood the speech of the animals, and the ‘New People’, the Cro-Magnons, did and do not. Really it was the case t
hat the animals would still speak when in the company of the Neanderthals; but they would pretend an inability to speak when in the company of the Cro-Magnons. They still pretend this inability when in the company of the ‘New People’, even today.

  All of the real original stories, all of the best stories, were first told by the animals. The bears were superb story-tellers; so were the deep-space geese (they took nine generations to make a migration, laying eggs on the space journey and hatching out of them on the space journey, for the summer-land of their migrations was not on Earth). The brindled cave-cats were very good story-tellers. Among the stories were well-established genre stories. The seals told under-water stories that they learned from river-and-ocean creatures; and the golden weasels, who really came from the moon, told all sorts of space stories. So the Neanderthals, who learned the stories from the animals, had a very good stock of tales.

  Space-Travel Stories, Time-Travel Stories (that thirty thousand-year-long winter was really a time-tampering story that had somehow gone wrong), under-ocean stories, other-species stories, robot-buffalo stories, out-of-body stories (the bodies of the animals and the bodies of the ‘red-bone people’ do not fit nearly as tight as do the bodies of the ‘new people’, and they are more easily slipped out of); ghostly-psycho stories (when you have a big, squat Neanderthal back-brain, or a bear's back-brain, you spend much of your time in the ghostly-psycho ambient), real ghost stories (remember that many of the stories were first told by ghost animals), heroic hunting stories, blood-and-thunder stories, randy comic stories and randy love stories, all of them.

  When the Neanderthals themselves became the story-tellers, an arrangement was made whereby stories coming through the red fire were as worthy as stories coming through the red throats of animals. But this good original stock of stories has become somewhat eroded. And now the great story-telling art itself has declined. What the stories have lost is their ancient sophistication and their pristine vigor. How to bring it back, how to bring it back?

  We story-tellers are still here, and we still belong to the old ‘red-bone people’, though few of us are full-bloods. Many or most of us do not know in our conscious moments that we belong to an ‘Old People’, but it is so. We are desirous of continuing our story-telling trade for we know no other. We are still funny-looking people. We don't come much for money. We don't ask for much.

  We want caves to tell our stories in, and good red fires in the entrances of those caves. We want good meat turning on spits over the red fire, and cannot it sometimes be wooly rhinoceros meat or dire wolf meat? That's about all we want.

  We've had other offers. We can go to Ganymede. They're in the middle of a fine Ice Age right now. They have tens of thousands of fine caves, some of them in the stone cliffs, some of them in the wonderful ice itself. They have the three-horned wooly rhinoceros. They have dire wolves that stand four meters high at the shoulders. They have a fossil wood that makes the reddest fire of any of all the worlds. They have just lost their own story-tellers. There is something very gruesome in the garbled account of how they lost them. It is like one of the superior horror stories enacted in life.

  You ‘New People’ could lose us, you know.

  The foregoing is the hidden truth about story-telling and story-tellers dredged up from the unconscious of one of the story-tellers.

  “Yes, but is the foregoing true?” somebody asks.

  Compared to the dismal lies that you ‘New People’ tell, the foregoing is Shining Truth itself.

  May 19, 1980

  Tell It Funny, Og

  In the beginning the world was good-humored, good-natured, genial, and funny. And the True Tales from the Beginning will always remember this.

  My own researches on how it was in the “dawn days” reveal that the first tales ever told were not only pleasant and funny but they also had elements of the “shaggy dog stories”, “shaggy bear stories”, and “shaggy people stories” in them. But what those earliest tales really were might be called “shaggy ogre stories”. The shaggy or hairy ogres were the first story-tellers, and they will probably be the last. Og the Ogre, the seventh son of the seventh son of Adam himself, was not the first of these story-tellers, but he is the first we know by name.

  Most story-tellers and story-writers are funny-looking, as I wrote in my previous epistle; they do have bug-eyes. They are “bug-eyed monsters”. They must have panoramic vision; they must see everything; they could not be good story-tellers without this wide vision. But only the bug-eyes have this panoramic vision.

  And they do have outsized ogre ears, knobby and bumpy and sometimes hairy. They would not be superb eavesdroppers or conversation-listeners without them; and they would not have their story materials if they did not eavesdrop massively on unsuspected and often quite distant talkers.

  The convoluted hairs of their hairy ears may be antennae that pick up waves on other than audio frequency. Og the Ogre, in all his descendants, does have this strong sensing, equal to that of the animals. He can see well, he can hear well, and he can smell superbly.

  Story-tellers are intended to be funny-looking, and stories are intended to be funny. The first unfunny stories were literary disasters, but they did not appear early.

  People and situations were pleasant and funny from the beginning. Strange lands were pleasant and funny. I remember the persons swallowed by a very large whale and their nine day journey through the fantastic lands and towns in his belly: strange and funny lands, those! Animals were funny and friendly, and so were the aliens. The pleasant and humorous aliens were of ancient establishment. The idea that there might be something unpleasant or unfriendly about aliens came much later.

  Alien monsters were pleasant and funny. One early and almost forgotten piece of history tells that Adam, in addition to naming all the sub-lunar creatures, also named the nine hundred and ninety-nine species of creatures who had their homes and nests above the moon, on other moons or trabants or asteroids or planets. And after they were named, the super-lunary creatures went back to their own places, with friendly memories of Earth, the ‘naming place’. So we do have nine hundred and ninety-nine alien species, monstrous but friendly, waiting to meet us again.

  About the story-tellers and the story-writers — well, the writers were almost as early as the tellers. Someday I will recount the invention of moveable type by Og the Ogre. It was living moveable type, very small flat-fish or alphabet fish who hopped into the hopper on voice command and printed their individual letters on pulp made of larch-wood. The alphabet fish could spell better than Og could, and their printing was very neat. But from the very first there were difficulties with the printed stories, difficulties of distribution and of profit margin mostly, so printing wasn't a great thing in the early days.

  The good-humor and funniness of the early stories (all of them were Science-Fiction or Knowledge-Fiction Stories) was not all expressed in extreme hilarity and horse-laughter. (In the beginning, horses laughed like horses, and men laughed like men.) The expression was urbane, civilized, deep and rich humor; it was universal, and often it was outrageous.

  In their deep and pleasant and often outrageous humor, Homer and Rabelais were full blood-brothers, and the time discrepancy between them may be disregarded. Ogres are not subject to time to the same degree that other folks are. Paleo-grammarians have written thousands of foot-notes to explain the verbal anomalies of Homer when the real explanation was that he was writing comic verse and that he created wry and goofy verbalisms for the fun of it. Neither Homer nor Rabelais was often guilty of the sin of pomposity.

  There is rollicking good-humor all through every Scripture. Samson, the riddle-telling judge and strong man, is full of high spirits even when going down to Gaza and to his death. David is full of fun when he invents the story of his victory over Goliath and sings it to his own harp music. Goliath was not that big, nor David that small; and moreover Goliath was killed by another warrior, Elhanan. But a story-teller can always fictionize accounts. The
re is a lot of fun in Balaam and his talking donkey, and in Ezekiel's account of those primitive flying machines. Who were those early barnstorming aviators anyhow?

  All the old Asian tales were comic, the Ramayana, the Panchantra Fables, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Shiva stories, the Mahabharata, the Druga stories, the Incarnation of Vishnu (there was a vaudeville act a few thousand years later that used many of his quick-change tricks). There was a giantism running through many of these old tales, and their being sacred tales was no inhibition to their being funny. There is nothing funnier than a Skyful of Giants.

  The Greek and Roman myths are full of fun, though there is often stark pain mixed in with it. The Cúchulain stories of Ireland are funny, and the Peredur story of Wales. All the Medieval stories are funny, some of them intentionally so, some of them unintentionally. There's a lot of good humor to be found in American Indian stories and in African stories. And the Arabian Nights stories are almost total fun.

  But something, almost from the beginning, has been seeping in to diminish the good-humor of the stories of our Earth. I do not know whether the tales of the friendly nine hundred and ninety-nine monstrous and alien species are subject to the same spoiling as are the tales of our own world. Everything in the world, in every world, is either good-humored or bad-humored. So all the bad-humored things were once locked up in an iron cavern and the iron doors made firm with bolts and locks. But some of the bad-humored things seep out and ooze out under the iron doors, and they do their damage to us.