Fall Issue 8
The Bible That Was A Swallow
By David Raimundo
Once upon a time there was a man who had a High View of Scripture. He truly cherished his High View of Scripture and it kept getting higher and higher day by day. This man’s view of Scripture kept rising like a helium balloon until eventually he needed glasses to see it far up in the clouds. Later on, he had to use binoculars to keep it in sight. He would never blink nor turn his eyes to the left or to the right; he would not be distracted by the busyness of those who passed him nor by the excitements and tumults arising from the bustle of ordinary life. His eyes were locked on the Scripture which, by then, was just a tiny little precious dot in the cloudy sky.
One day, however, tragedy came: the tiny little dot turned around and zigzagged towards a distant tree branch. The startled man, still wearing the binoculars, realized that the tiny little dot was, after all, a mere swallow. Of Scripture there was no sign. Up in the cloudy sky there were many tiny little dots and one can only conclude that, as his view of Scripture kept rising higher and higher, the poor man got confused and lost sight of it.
Finally, the man put the binoculars down and looked around in panic. Terror and anxiety took hold of him. A complex, immense and rich drama unveiled itself all around him, but he felt clueless standing there alone on the ground-zero of real life.
A Sense of Wonder
R.A. Lafferty’s Strange Doings
By Steven Gomez
I first heard of R.A. Lafferty by reading Neil Gaiman. In his collection Fragile Things, Gaiman praises Lafferty as one of the best short story writers in the world. Eager to find a new author I’d probably like, I looked up Lafferty’s name in the library and found nothing. I looked it up on Amazon and found the next worst thing to nothing: an incredibly expensive specialty edition that was a first volume in a complete collection, and well out of my price range. I began scouring used bookstores and continuously came up empty until a couple of years ago when I finally hit paydirt: not just the short story collection Nine Hundred Grandmothers but also two of his novels. Soon after, a trip to Powell’s Books in Portland resulted in another Lafferty collection, Strange Doings.
Lafferty is almost entirely unclassifiable. Elements of science fiction blend with fantasy tropes before being mixed into a surrealist cocktail. He plays with language and the reader’s sense of reality in equal measure. But it is precisely this verb ‘play’ which makes his stories both too much to read in large doses and also too good to put down. He is palpably enjoying throwing us for a loop. No one who writes the sentence “And Judy retched funfully” could be doing anything else.
Galli was an hereditary storyteller of the Indies. “There is only one story in the world,” he said, “and it pulls two ways. There is the reason part that says ‘Hell, it can’t be’ and there is the wonder part that says ‘Hell, maybe it is.’” He was the storyteller, and he offered to teach me the art. (“Cliffs That Laughed”)
Throwing people for a loop seems to be a theme of this collection. Characters who think of themselves as smart, intelligent people are confronted by the unusual or fantastic, declare it to be impossible, and are then swept away by the allegedly impossible reality bearing down upon them like a tidal wave. At the beginning of “The Transcendant Tigers”, a young girl solves an insoluble toy puzzle over and over again, while her father explains to his friend why the puzzle can’t be solved. When his wife tries to show him what their daughter has done, he asks not to be interrupted and goes on with his inane prattle.
Lafferty also invites us to play around with the idea of what is real and what is imaginary. The surreal tale “Entire and Perfect Chrysolite” introduces us to a group of people who can apparently bring what they imagine into reality. They are sailing on the southern coast of Libya, the world they live in being the one depicted by the ancients, oval in shape and lacking an African continent. So they imagine Africa as we know it and it becomes real — along with the crocodiles, the rhinoceros, and the pythons who all try to kill them as the people gradually realize they are in a swamp instead of on their ship.
The unreal, strange, and wonderous is a force of nature in these stories, challenging the limits of our intelligence in the face of the fantastic. And there is often a sense of deeper, more profound truths than either the characters or the reader are able to plumb. “World Abounding”, an incredibly strange but also wonderous longer story about an expedition to an impossibly alive alien planet, touches on the mysteries of God and creation and life in ways that probably only multiple readings will be able to suss out.
Lafferty is never very interested in reproducing reality. Instead he soars to improbable heights of dream-world nonsense. Even his dialogue is wonderfully stilted and unbelievable. The net effect of a fine Lafferty story turns out, however, to be not escape but illumination. Even while he forces us to abandon common sense, he gives us a sense of wonder at life in the world.
Is there something of the sacramental in such a way of writing? Lafferty was a Catholic and often plays with spiritual themes and Biblical language; his novel Fourth Mansions (which I have yet to read) seems to be inspired by St Teresa of Avila’s The Interior Castle. What might seem like nonsense when compared to the rational order of realistic fiction may actually be trying to reproduce something like the in-breaking of the Divine into our perception and redefining what we call real. Shifting our priorities from what we can grasp to what we can be in awe of.
The first story in Strange Doings, “Rainbird”, is about a scientist who invents the most amazing and useful things, like a time machine (which Lafferty calls a ‘retrogressor,’ defying even the conventional genre vocabulary) which lets him go back and start his career over so he can develop even more wonderful advancements. But always he reaches the end of his life wishing he’d focused on what now seems to him important: achieving more and more. He returns yet again to the beginning of his career, a morning when he decided to stop enjoying the sport of hawking and get back to work, but he finds his younger self too distracted to pay attention to what his older self has to say. And eventually he becomes distracted himself. Soon, Higgston Rainbird is no longer known as a fabulous inventor because he has learned the value of appreciating a beautiful morning with his pet hawk, high above the clouds, wondering at the glory of the world.
This concentrated dose of wonder is what makes Lafferty overwhelming, but also strangely addictive. He holds you in his spell until he’s finished a story, but once it’s done you need to come up for air. He’s one of those writers who has somehow managed to capture what his writing is like in his own inimitable style:
For the next three and a half hours he held that intelligent audience completely spellbound, enchanted. They followed, or seemed to follow, his lightning flashes of metaphor illumining the craggy chasms of his vasty subjects.
They thrilled to the magnetic power of his voice, urbane yet untamed, with its polyglot phrasing and its bare touch of accent so strange as to be baffling; ancient surely and European, and yet from a land beyond the pale. And they quivered with interior pleasure at the glorious unfolding in climax after climax of these before only half-glimpsed vistas.
Here was the world of mystery revealed in all its wildness, and it obeyed and stood still, and he named its name. The nebula and the conch lay down together, and the ultra galaxies equated themselves with the zeta mesons. Like the rich householder, he brought from his store treasures old and new, and nothing like them had ever been seen or heard before.
At one point Professor Timiryaseff cried out in bafflement and incomprehension, and Doctor Ergodic Eimer buried his face in his hands, for even these most erudite men could not glimpse all the shattering profundity revealed by the fantastic speaker.
And when it was over, they were delighted that so much had been made known to them like a great free gift. They had the crown without the cross, and the odd little genius had filled them all with a rich glow. (“Aloys”)
Get To Know Your RCSA Council
An Interview with Alice
Alice Hodgkins kindly agreed to be interviewed for the Et Cetera as part of an ongoing series profiling the RCSA Council and what they do for our Student Association—that’s all of us. She started at Regent in the Fall term of 2018.
What’s your job on the RCSA Council?
I’m Vice-President Internal this year. This basically means that I support community life within Regent in various ways from working to put on bigger events like the Christmas Celebration or like L’Chaim in the spring, to much much more every day things like sitting on committees, selling lockers, or making sure you get cookies after your first OT exam.
What were you doing before coming to Regent?
I was teaching high school in North Carolina, writing and history to kids ages 14-17. I loved them. But also I got tired. Now, in my current context at Regent, it’s easy to forget that was even part of my life, but you may be reminded if I start spouting obscure facts about the American Civil War or suddenly get bossy and start calling you “kiddo.”
Would you rather be without elbows or be without knees?
If I didn’t have elbows I couldn’t hug people or hold a book close enough to my face to read it. But if I didn’t have knees, I could at least lounge dramatically on a couch all day, which would be okay with me.
If you could have dinner with three poets, living or dead, who would they be?
At the moment Christina Rossetti, Jeanne Murray Walker, and (always) George Herbert. But honestly, I don’t think poets are necessarily the best dinner party guests, so it might need to be three separate dinners...
Two-Sentence Tales
Scratch That by Steven Gomez & Ryan Legg
I couldn’t get the damn cat off the counter when I tried to pick up my presecription. The pharmacist ended up selling me iodine as well.