Sunday, March 26, 2017

GIFTS, POWERS, LIVES, WORLDS, SECRETS (Fourth Mansions Chapter 3)

Here's a basic outline of the chapter, focusing on shifts in setting:

0. Epigraph - Don't drop it!
1. "A section of town that he had always been a little frightened of."
    History/Biography, Psychic Geography, Larkers
2. "The house of the address was a tipsy four-storied frame building"
    Interloper and Interrogators
3. "The return way is open even when the senders are unaware."
    Brain-weave interlude
    Bertigrew Bagley
5. "through dark streets...into the night door of his own newspaper building."

0. Chapter 3 opens with a Michael Fountain quote from something called the Second Trefoil Lectures. Michael Fountain is still a mysterious character at this point and nothing in Chapter 3 will give us any more information about him.

This quote lays out one of the major ideas of the novel, that "our group soul" is ready to advance: "We come to the verge, to the mansions of the fourth height, in a moving moment of dizzy expectation and extreme danger, up under a new Heaven with a new Earth in our hands."

Later, Bagley will reflect that "There've been a hundred points where mankind was frustrated from real clarification and grace."

One of the questions of the novel is whether or not this point will be another point of frustration.

1. After the breeziness of all of the dialogue in Chapter 2, we get a hard stop. Suddenly, the present action stops and we are given an extended peek into Freddy Foley's childhood. This childhood is concretely expressed through physical aspects of environment. We are given a brief tour of one part of Freddy's psychic geography and a look at a series of items and people that populate that geography.

If one of the themes of the book is Freddy growing up and finding his face, then this little bit of Chapter 3 provides a picture of Freddy as child. He was/is a fearful boy in a very rough part of town. There is hell to avoid. There is the gift of life, all unearned and unasked for. There are railroad tracks connecting this part of town to the possibility of elsewhere.

And there are the Larkers.

2a. Freddy follows his note to a house for a meeting. Before the meeting, he comes across Leo Joe Larker.

Leo Joe Larker is a fascinating character and I think important. I can't quite figure him out. He does return later in the novel in an important role. I'm not quite sure what to do with his shifting racial identity and shifting appearance. I have suspicions, but I'm not sure that I can put it all together. Maybe at the end of this re-read, I'll have it all figured out. Maybe.

Some info:

"Leo Joe.....who was the oldest of the Larkers and four years older than Freddy....said, moveover, that they could work magic, and that he himself had raised a man from the dead."

Leo Joe says:
"I'm an interloper."
"I'm putting in first claim on you."
"I have an override on all threats to you."

I think that we have to take Leo Joe at his word. He is an interloper. He interlopes. Lafferty uses the word 'interloper' again later in the chapter in a pejorative sense, but here I think he means it as a positive description.

There is a hint later in the chapter that Leo Joe is possibly a part of the extended complex network of the Congregation of Patricks, which consists of "Exarchs, Crolls, Autocrats, Larkers, Aloysii, Patriarchs, and so on up to the Emperor himself."

(Here's an aside not about Leo Joe. It's said by Bagley that the office of emperor has been vacant for more than a thousand years. Any guesses on who was the last emperor?)

2b. "He pulled up a chair and sat down at the table with the three men."

This section is pretty straightforward. Some thugs try to intimidate Freddy and threaten to replace him. The section accomplishes the purpose of establishing that there is a real threat to Freddy's life and that there are real people actively covering up some business of people being replaced by other people.

3. As Freddy leaves this meeting, he gets brain signals from Miguel, a character that we've yet only seen in these veiled brain-weave moments. This section does give us a clear description of the openness of the brain-weave, that Freddy is receiving information that he wasn't meant to be receiving.

"The authors of the brain-weave believe that they have transmitted somehow through polarized one-way glass; but it is two-way. The return way is open even when the senders are unaware, and all those who have been touched by the weave are themselves somehow in touch, even when the weavers or Harvesters are asleep."

There's also a bit here about Letitia Bauer and deformed monkey babies, a "rambling-in-waste-places delirium."

4. Bertigrew Bagley.

One gets the sense that Lafferty loved Bagley. There's certainly a lot of Lafferty in Bagley.

On Overlark and the "old crippling persuasion" and the cost of challenging it.
"Once you get your hands onto the thing you will learn a little of its nature. You'll feel the rot of it, the leprosy that will not be stamped out. And you'll see that its face is always respectability. But if you follow up to the end you will not be respectable yourself."

"I do not see everything in black or white. I see most things in the four or five central colors or forces. In the middle, of course, is that malodorous worm whom we call common man. He is mud-colored. And around him are the four sorts of creatures who assail him while they claim to love him, but mine is the only sort that actually loves him."


It is in this section of the chapter that Bagley gives us a breakdown of the parties involved in the growing conflict.

"Of the four sorts of creatures that surround the Castle are the Pythons, the Toads, the Badgers, and the Unfledged Falcons."

"Some of it's from the beautiful things of a lady named Teresa Cepeda, born a little after Columbus died. He only discovered continents; she discovered the Castle itself."

Malodorous Worms - Freddy Foley, the commonality of mankind
"You are one of the malodorous worms, Foley, the commonality of mankind, the simplicity. Me, I'm a badger."

Pythons - Jim Bauer and the Harvesters
"the brain-weavers, the Harvesters, they belong to the pythons....pythons are prophetic."

Toads - Carmody Overlark and the other revenants.
"The revenants are the toads." "The returners really do have the jewel, and it may be the jewel of knowledge."

Badgers - Bertigrew Bagley and the Congregation of Patricks
"the badgers... Ours is the real; but even if I should tell you all about it you would regard us as a network of lodges or curious societies or comical conventions. Can you not see that it is your apparent government and world that is these things? Foley, there are alternate worlds going on all the time, depending only on the vision. There is a double reflection. I do not accept yours, and sure would not accept mine. But I say that mine is alive and that its more favorable time-track may still be selected." "Have you heard of Christendom still living?"

Unfledged Falcons - Miguel and "probably a hundred such movements starting right now"
"The unfledged falcon appears more reptilian than the reptiles. But sometimes it grows, it is fledged, it flies. At its best, to me, it is only mediocre: it was the Crusades; it was the Ottonian Empire (an interloper); it is the firm but doltish authority. At its worst it is the fascist thing." "A young man has been torched with this fever....His name comes to me as Miguel."

5. The chapter ends with a chase scene, Freddy running back into town and safety, avoiding the pursuit of men following him with presumed murderous intent.

"Freddy might be a simpleton but he was an agile simpleton. They did not have him that night."

"But somebody was after Freddy Foley and they weren't kidding."

Tuesday, March 14, 2017


Chapter 2 should come as a relief to anyone troubled by Chapter 1. There is plenty of exposition and much of the murkiness of Chapter 1's brain-weave clears up as affected characters converse with one another. Chapter 2 is a direct continuation of Chapter 1.

All the events of Chapter 2 occur "later that night."

 Here is the basic structure:
 1) Freddy and Biddy
-At the Scatterbrain Lounge
-At Michael Fountain's Apartment
-After Fountain's Apartment
2) Freddy and Selim -At the City Museum

Also, structurally, the most important thing to note is that this chapter is (almost) entirely a wall of dialogue. The plot is propelled through the conversations of the characters. It's a verbal feast and makes me yearn for a great radio play adaptation of the play produced by Jim Freund and Stefan Rudnicki. Then again, if the novel ever got adapted into a television show, I can see Episode 2 (adapting Chapter 2) accomplished in one virtuoso tracking shot, following "action" from bar to street to apartment to street to museum.

Conversation #1 - Freddy and Biddy at the bar transitioning to Freddy and Biddy on their way to Fountain's.
Conversation #2 - Freddy and Biddy speak with Michael Fountain.
Conversation #3 - Freddy and Biddy post-Fountain.
Conversation #4 - Freddy and Selim at the City Museum.

So, what do we learn from these conversations?

-Freddy "had the notion that perhaps Carmody Overlark... was the same man as Khar-ibn-Mod, a Mameluke diplomat who served an Egyptian Caliph some [500] years back."
-Carmody Overlark "..changed his name...From Charles to Carmody, and just about two years ago." He has a reputation, possibly "inserted back in time a little," as "an intellectual, a legend, an amateur of all the arts, and a patron." His face is "probably Moravian." He "suffers from asthma--these last two years."

-Michael Fountain's nephew was most definitely killed by the brain weave. Micheal Fountain himself slipped the brain weave "almost completely." He does not know who they did find and change, "But it was somebody whose mind has touched mine, who was in a certain accord with me, a young man's mind, and I do not know whose." [Attentive readers will remember the name Miguel Fuentes from last chapter though the relationship is still a mystery.]

-Goal of the Harvesters?
Fountain: "You will attempt mutation on yourselves, or perhaps it will be mutilation. It will not work."
Biddy: "It will work! We've seen the castle on top of the hill. We'll climb that hill, we'll be the first people ever to climb it. We'll be the first super-people, the first people able to grasp the vision. And we'll lead the rest of humanity up to it." .... "Despise us, loathe us! We'll show you. We'll redeem you all. We'll make the breakthrough to intellectualized, celestialized, chthonized, socialized, paranaturalized, cosmosized, one-other-word-that-I-forgot." (yes, Lafferty is having fun here!)
Freddy: "my own girl has turned into one of the snakes."

Finally, Freddy pretty much lays out every bit of the plot thus far to his friend Selim:
Selim: "Is it the live things or the dead things that are bothering you tonight, Freddy?"
Freddy: "It's those things that won't make up their mind which they are. See, there are these brain folks that Biddy runs around with, three Shes out of Haggard and three Borgia types out of Baron Corvo. They mix up this brain stuff and put it out in psychic jolts. It knocked me to my knees the first time they used it on me. Tonight they tried it on Michael Fountain. He slipped them, but it killed his nephew and bit into someone else. Now they're raising up something that would be better dead, and they've put me onto a man who ought to be dead."
And a little later, Freddy: "You get plugged into their brain-weave and you stay plugged in. They plug into someone else, and you're connected too. And sometimes now I'm connected with [Fuentes] when they're not."

(If you're still confused by the novel, read that a few times. It should clear everything up. Once you've read it a few times, have fun looking up Shes out of Haggard and Borgia types out of Baron Corvo.)

Finally, Freddy learns a little more at the museum. "The life-mask is that of a civil servant who served under Akhnaton, the heretic king of Egypt.... lived around 1350 B.C., or around 900 B.C., if you follow the timetable of Velikovsky." The name of the mask? - "Kir-ha-Mod.... transliterated as Kar-Ha-Mod."
Freddy: "It's the same face three times, it's the same name three times."

The chapter ends with Freddy finding an address in his pocket. Freddy resolves to go to the address while hearing some Mexican-Spanish talk ("cooking up something big") in his head.


Some few other things....

-Scatterbrain Lounge is a great name for a bar.
-Hugh Hamtree gets my favorite laugh out loud lines in the novel with his helpful suggestion that the guy might have gotten froze in a block of ice. I love the idea of a bartender listening to Freddy and Biddy's crazy conversation and attempting to make a helpful suggestion.
-With all of the dialogue, the few spots of non-dialogue commentary stick out all the more. For example, see this post's title.

Tuesday, March 7, 2017

YOU ARE ALREADY SNAKE-BIT (Fourth Mansions Chapter 1)


What do we get in Chapter 1?

Here's the basic structure:

1) Prologue
2) Intro to Freddy
3) Intro to the Harvesters
      -Harvesters Gathered
      -Brain-weave in action






Intro to Freddy




Intro to the Harvesters


Here is the SFE entry on Psionics:












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Is Fourth Mansions science fiction or fantasy? Or something else?
