“Old dogs, lying in the sun, are one form of history,” Pomodorus wrote.
Old residual magnetism, lying in the Earth, is another form.
Question 382: In what state will the bodies of the just arise?
The bodies of the just will rise glorious and immortal.
Glorious means? Our body will be shining like the sun, swift as thought, as capable of penetrating matter, be most beautiful, and be without pain or change.
Immortal means? Our bodies will never die after the resurrection.
Question 383: Will the bodies of the damned also rise?
The bodies of the damned will also rise, but they will be condemned to eternal punishment.
—the Baltimore Catechism.
I have become fascinated by all aspects of bodies, our own undead bodies, our own dead bodies, our own resurrected bodies. Just as a special mental power has been available to us all along, had we not forgotten to use it, so a special body splendor is ours whenever we require it in order to make splendid moves. How did we ever happen to forget how wonderful we are? Yes, in our own great and shining moment, our bodies shine as with a sun within them. They are as swift as thought, for they are the bright depositories of all swift thought. Our bodies can penetrate matter as thought does. They can be most beautiful. Whether they can be so splendid and superior all the time I don't know; but apparently they can penetrate all time from their eternal moment.
Still quite early in this moment there had been a change of emphasis. Or should I say ‘Still quite early in this day there has been a change of emphasis!’? I suppose that I use ‘day’ as Scripture sometimes uses it. There are the days that go by, and there is the Day that abides. Many days go by, but the whole ‘Casey Condition’ occurs in a single day, in a single moment really.
Still quite early in this moment there had been a change of emphasis. In my own murky heart, I had assumed, along with the soggy sinner in one of the dialogues I have given, that the ‘lost’ souls could have more fun out of it than could the ‘found’ or ‘saved’ souls, that the main jolt would be the dirt and the scandal and the sedition and the slander, and the blackmailing knowledge; and that these things would sell the Machines and set the Conditions.
(The ‘Machines’ were porno shrines: they weren't really needed, except for the true believers in holy porn.)
But quite early in the day this prevailing view was disputed.
“We will take our chances in this world, and in every world! Let the grace flow! Write down our names! We enter the lists!” some hundreds of persons spoke for some millions. “There will be more Good Will than Bad Will, else has the world been in vain. And it has not been in vain.”
Now here was a real apple-knocker that nobody in my crowd had foreseen! There were alternatives to the ‘enjoyable degradation’, to the ‘polite rottenness’, to the ‘healthy prurience’. There was a live possibility of things that were outside of the wallow-and-revel-and-gloat experience and goal. When everyone knew all about everyone, not everyone chortled and gluttonized and fed on the worst.
Some persons found that the more fully they knew other people the more they liked them.
There was something suspect to me about the Moment. I did not suspect its power or scope. I suspected its permanence. Oh yes, the moment would last forever, as every true Moment must. But we would not stand in the Moment forever. We would probably stand out of it, and in it, and out of it again several times. I had the feeling that we would stand out of it again, for a while, in the very near future.
I saw the fiery message in the bush. I saw the sign in the sky.
I saw the handwriting on the wall, in rather archaic Babylonian or Chaldee.
So I took two precautions against the coming time when we would stand out of the moment again.
I went to see about Continuous-Flow Federal Funding.
And I had a ‘Remember It’ memory jog capsule inset into my own brain. The capsule was tuned to retain the whole idea of the Casey Machine. But why did I believe that was necessary? Who could possibly forget the Casey Machine?
Oh, I'd made a study of this business of forgetting eleven-day wonders. I can recognize the accumulations of forgotten fossils of such fads, but I can seldom interpret those fossils. A minority of the vanished eleven-day wonders is still in popular memory with a nostalgic or humorous handle on them; but even these which are so enshrined in toy shrines are mostly misremembered and misunderstood. And others of the chronic occurrences, and among them there may be some of the most massive and influential, are forgotten completely. A few of the deeply forgotten ones we can pick up with the Casey Machine or the Casey Condition, but we must have at least some slight whisper of an idea of what we want to pick up.
I wanted to remember the Casey Machine and the Casey Condition. I had no reason to believe that they would be forgotten, but I had an intuition and apprehension that they might be.
So I went to see about Continuous-Flow Federal Funding, about Compensatory Counter-Flow Payments, about Impacted Entertainment Area Federal Funding. The argument was that the Casey Machine, since payment was required for its use, was more available to the rich than to the poor. This situation should be corrected by Counterpart Funds of both the Current and the Future Contingency sort. I also got the concession that the site of every Casey Machine should be declared a shrine, with Perpetual Care to be provided by means of Perpetual Guardian Payments to be made to a responsible group — our own.
And we got the guarantees, in several sorts of payments, to be in perpetuity. And several of them were real whoppers. It's all in knowing how to ask for things, and in striking while the Casey Machine is hot.
And I had the ‘Remember It’ memory jog installed in my brain. In the extreme case of specific and directed amnesia, I might forget the Casey Machine along with every one else. But I'd still come closer to remembering it than anyone else would.
“I want to know when it was last on the house.
I want to know which has the heart of a louse.
I want to know who has been milking my cowse.
—Promontory Goats
The Wiper comes by and wipes out part of the memories. Then he comes by again and wipes out more of them. And who is the Wiper?
He is a cloud-high giant. He comes with a rag and wipes out part of a cloud. And when he does that, he wipes out part of a thing in people's heads too. A little boy told me that today, and I'm sure he had a good intuitive understanding of the Wiper-Person.
And since the boy told me that, I have seen several good pictures of the Wiper drawn on walls and sidewalks.
Oh sure, it worked. Only to the superficial is it irrational that we should know much more after we are dead than we do while we are alive; or that we should know much more when we are in a moment than when we are not in it. I will only say that every Casey Machine had somehow the essence of a dead person in it. In this great increase of knowledge, a lifetime of preparation is translated and traded for a moment of intense possession; and, by the technicality of it being on the far side of time, that moment of possession is forever. But we set it up on the near side of time. We set up the links, and it worked.
What possibilities that does open out, if only they were explored!
Oh, they were explored all right. And now those possibilities and explorations are on the boneyard with other obsolete eleven day wonders.
Oh sure, it busted. What busted?
The strained case of an achronological device applied to working chronicity. That busted. It's been gone for a while now. No use crying over spilled temporalities.
I fail to see how even the worst storms on Venus can be held responsible for it. Sunspots could have done it, of course. But if you blame everything on sunspots, that's like one person playing a four handed game by himself.
The mania hadn't taken up much real time. That is why it was so easily erased and forgotten. It moved into the abiding moment. Then it moved out of it again, and it was gathered to its fath
ers. Its fathers were the earth forces, magnetism and isostases and geothermal accretions that make up the matrix into which all eleven day wonders are subsumed.
The earth-forces are made up of very many such-gatherings-in or subsumptions, and of very little other basic flux. I believe that worlds that have not subsumed such emotional content or happening will have very little magnetism or corona or foinse.
The Casey Machine, being an achronological device, may indeed have happened. Only not yet.
The what machine being a what?
There is a feeling that things had been rather underdone for a while. Death had become (or may become) so minor an event that no one paid much attention to it. And then the condition moved. It did not move to take the place and importance that it had held before the bothering. It moved to another and different place and importance.
Something was subsumed into the earth forces. That is like one more limey and crunchy marine skeleton being subsumed into the floor of the ocean.
Item: I bet I went to that well longer than anyone else did. I bet I still go sometimes.
Item: I still have more money flowing in than any one else has. And I partly remember what it's for.
I have had a small electro-mechanical device removed from my brain. I don't know how it got there or what it was for.
This is a strange journal that I have started to write in again as part of my therapy. But the words in most of it are utterly incomprehensible to me.
I have a feeling of many strangers whom I once knew very well, and who once knew me very well. And sometimes they approach me. “I miss you and Regina so much,” a dumpy lady said to me only this morning. “I enjoyed it a lot, the way I had the feel of you and everything you'd do. I'd catch you sometimes just before I got up in the morning.” Strange!
And a man said to me, just last week, or just this week: “There was never a mind I enjoyed so much as yours. At night sometimes I used to light my pipe and take off my shoes and just listen to the things you were thinking. It was a pleasure.” Strange, most strange!
Certain standing moments of realization are interposed through history. And then they are forgotten by fiat. But the buried memory of them sustains us and fills us with promise. I like as much as I can remember of it. And something similar will move into the moment again in another aeon or so.
I still go to that well a lot. But the bucket I dip with is different from the one I used to use. And there are still the Federal Funds forever.
Addenda
I'm grisly ghost with orange gloves.
I'm other things around the edges.
I seek for valid lives and loves.
I teeter on ungodly ledges.
—Electronic Elegies
Newton Prescott
Who am I try to kid? I'm trying to kid myself, Newton Prescott. But to the best of belief, there is no such person as Newton Prescott. He is (I am) only a minor aspect of Casey Szymansky. I watched as my orange gloved hand wrote the above verses; but it wrote them in Casey's handwriting, not in my own. Yes, sometimes I'm permitted a handwriting of my own. The morning paper hasn't arrived yet, so I don't know what year this is. So I don't know whether Casey is supposed to be alive or dead.
It was all reasonably simple when it began. I (whether or not I was an independent person or an aspect of Casey) devised the Casey Machine. It was simply a wireless audio-machine (with video variations) that transmitted unspeakably vile stuff for unspeakably vile subscribers. We selected unspeakably wealthy subscribers (Chicago was then full of them), shot a highly sophisticated dart into the head of each of them, and so hooked most of them. We collected. And when they objected to paying, we cut them off or threatened to cut them off. Most of them couldn't abide being cut off from the hellish thing so they caved in. But somehow very high federal investigators confronted Casey with their evidence and their suspicions. But Casey rises to great heights when confronted with anything. People and institutions confront Casey at their peril. The Federals set up a giant foundation to fund the Casey Machine forever, whether or not it was in physical existence. The Federals were lucky to get out of it so easy. They were hooked by Hell, but Casey always swore that he had nothing to do with anything hellish.
The morning paper has arrived. With trepidation I look at the year of its date. The year may vary as much as three decades in one week, back to before I ever heard of Casey, to a fearfully late year as on today’s paper. This means that Casey has been dead for several years, and that I am a ghost, or may be something less.
“Oh, you were always a ghost,” Casey told me brutally once. “I had one splinter of my personality that I decided to give a ghostly body and an inane name to. And the most inane name I could think of was Newton Prescott. You will move back and forth through time as I will, Newton, and you will still be ghost here after I am gone from this world. You will be eyes and ears for me here.”
“You are hellish, Casey. I want out.”
“You are only a minor quirk of me, Newton,” he said, “and there is no ‘out’ for a minor quirk.”
But Casey always swore that he had nothing to do with anything hellish. Once, before a dozen or so of us, two or three of us being only aspects of Casey, but others valid persons, Casey brought out a brim-full basin and washed his hands dramatically.
“God over my head,” he swore, “I am guiltless of anything hellish. By the brightness of this water, I wash my hands from any evil or any traffic with ungodly devices.” And he washed his hands, and they were unaccountably clean.
“But it isn't bright water. The basin is full of blood!” I protested, but nobody seemed to hear me. Often, people do not seem to hear me.
Well, Casey's hands were clean. But mine (My God, how was that?) were slippery with dark visceral blood that would never come off me. Oh, it was simple enough. He transferred his hellishness from his main person to a minor splinter of his personality, me. He fooled everybody with the trick. Did he fool God also? So far as I can tell, he did.
I got me a dozen expensive pair of beautiful suede white gloves. I wear them always. But they are not white when I wear them. They are always a tolerable orange color. Well, I can live (live?) with that. I have to.
The rental lady just came in with a medium young couple and began to show them my apartment. They did not seem to see me. It is a very nice apartment, and she offered it to them at a foolishly low price.
“It's wonderful, it's wonderful,” the looking lady said, “and the price is also wonderful. But there is an odor so faint that it could almost be my imagination. It's the odor of old dried blood. No, it isn't. It's the odor of old still-wet blood. Whatever can it be?”
“There's something flitting around in here,” the looking man said. “I just miss it with the corner of my eye. Oh, oh, it's the ghost hands, the ‘Orange Ghost Hands’. This is the ‘Haunted Hands’ apartment isn't it? Can't you show us something else?”
“Oh yes, I have a wonderful place just around the corner,” the rental lady said. “Not as wonderful as this, and not as wonderfully cheap, but it isn't haunted. We'll go see it now.”
But the rental lady came up to me before she left. “Ghosty,” she said, “why do you do this to me? And why can I see you and talk to you when the others can't?”
“It's that hellish machine you're hooked on,” I said.
“Oh, oh, oh!” she said. “How can I get unhooked from it?”
“I wish I knew,” I said. “I wish I knew.”
The Forty-Seventh Island
1.
“Quincy, we will have to do something about the snakes in the girls room,” Europa Phelan said. “The pressure to get rid of them is intolerable, what with Earth Night coming up and all.” “Oh, beat a different drum for a while,” Quincy Phelari told her. “There is nothing wrong with those snakes. They have been personal friends of all of us for a long time. If Hugo Katz doesn't like them then so much the worse for Hugo Katz. I like them and the girls like them. They have style, they have charm,
they have beauty, they have colored soul, they have dignity and grace. Hugo Katz has none of these things. I say let's keep the snakes and get rid of Hugo Katz.”
The snakes did have style and charm and beauty. They coiled and uncoiled with kaleidoscopic change. They poured themselves, it seemed, as from one set of goblets into another set of goblets. They fell like churning colored foam in waterfalls, and they rose like slow-motion fountains. They turned themselves inside-out and back again, swallowing and regurgitating them selves. They were cascades of jewels tumbling down and then climbing up over themselves again. They were dazzles, they were compositions in color and perspective, they were prismatic splitting and recombining of banded colors, they were hypnotic dream-memory wheels turning like incredible differential gears, they were wit-in-movement, they were outrageously colored jokes in rapid juxtaposition.
They were persons with their diamond-bright person-eyes shining out in ever-new recognitions. They were aromas, evocative and prescient, allegorical and impossibly foreign. They could give out any odor imaginable, and they themselves had overreaching imagination in this. They could give odors on command or suggestion. They were companionable, and yet they weren't pushy.
They hadn't any voices. But they could play pan-pipes and horns if these were fixed onto little stanchions for them. They weren't as musical as might be expected from such colorful creatures, but they played with good spirit and heartiness. They were about as good as Stoker's Seals in their execution, though they couldn't remember as many tunes as could the seals. On original tunes, they couldn't come up with movements of longer than six notes, nothing at all intricate.
The Man Who Talled Tales: Collected Short Stories of R.A. Lafferty Page 263