Summa Risus: Collected Non-Fiction

by R. A. Lafferty

  May 24, 1976

  Dear Richard:

  I did not write nor send to you the verses that you have published under my name in #17 of SFR. No harm done, except they aren't very good.

  A little suspicion about the rest of the issue then, which quickly turns into a big suspicion. Here is a flock of Bright and Shining (hereafter referred to as the b-and-esses) Names attached to letters and reviews and comments. But much of this stuff is of thinner quality than could be expected of real b-and-esses. Have the b-and-esses been under-dealt and under-cut? Is there a Shadow Incompetency grinding these things out and slipping them in under the b-and-s names? Please investigate, unless you yourself have been under-dealt and substituted, in which case don't bother.

  Notes From The Golden Age

  Esquire Magazine asked me whether I wanted to submit, on speculation only, a piece on the probability of a new Golden Age. I sent them this but they didn't take it, so the speculation didn't pay off. I believe that they used five or six pieces on the subject, but I can't locate the issue they appeared in.

  The king was in his counting-house. He was counting to see whether there was enough gold to maintain the golden age that had already begun, in wobbly fashion, and almost unnoticed. And he was amazed by the amount of gold that he found.

  “There's enough here to keep it going for a long century,” he said, “and likely for much longer than that no matter how prodigal we are with it. Let us examine whether there are any demand certificates against it.” He examined, but all the certificates were in favor of his treasury. There was still very much gold to come in if only places could be found to store it. The counting-house was full; the drinking halls and dining halls were full of it; the private rooms and kitchens and pantries were all full of gold. There was bright gold enough for a long need. “Is there a catch to it?” the king asked. “Let us examine for catches.”

  Several times before, there had seemed to be enough gold to mount and maintain a golden age. But then rats had come and eaten it all, and it was then seen that it had not been real gold but inferior yellow corn. At other times bugs and birds had come and eaten it, and then it was seen that it had been only yellow honey and not gold.

  This, however, was genuine gold. The king had sophisticated tests that had not been available in earlier ages and that were not available to commoners, and they indicated absolutely that the gold was real.

  The king also had sophisticated tests for something else. He had gauges that measured the extent and quality of gaps between various things: between peoples and parties and zeitgeists and promontories and principalities and such things subject to division. The gauge-tests showed that few of the gaps were impossibly wide and that many of them were of an ideal spacing (a new understanding about this spacing was just appearing). The tests showed that most of the gaps were lively and effective spark-gaps. There were pleasant and quick lightnings and discharges playing between many terminals; there was a sparkiness that really sang; there were auras and coronas with a lot of color and sound to them. It was all very electric and impregnating.

  “It's all here in that rough and inexact perfection that is required for such things,” the king admired. “The age might as well begin now. Oh, I see that it has already begun without asking anyone's leave. Good, good!” And the king walked away while the happy lightning and thunder played about everything.

  But where had all the gold come from? And where had the charged atmospheres and the tension-balances of the arty meteorologies and lightnings come from? Oh, the gold had been transmuted from trash. And the sparky tension-balances had been generated partly by those same transmutations and partly by a great number of converging happenings.

  The gold was transmuted from ordinary trash?

  No. From splendid trash.

  In our own time we are already into a golden age of the arts and sciences and technologies and life-settings and scenes and group-and-personal-scenarios. This has happened against almost all opinion that this age was fat and grubby and tasteless and immoral and witless. It has happened when all the pundits and pandits said that it was the most unlikely possibility ever.

  What? We are in a golden age, with rotten-rock music and blind-goat art? We are in a golden age, with writing divided between porno and corno and with drama only a mush-mouthed presentation of writing? With cookery still back in the potato age and with two-legged sheep bleating all over the place, we are in a golden age? Sure we are. Say it quickly and casually and it goes down more easily. This is the one thing clear about the present world: it has already entered a golden age.

  Well, if the goldening has happened with us in our own time (And it has happened: open your scabby eyes and see that it has happened), then what prevents every age from becoming a golden age?

  What prevents are terrible gaps and divisions that do not narrow or close. And again, what prevents are the great blocks of worthlessness that can infest a society.

  In our own recent yesterday there had been a great gap between the ‘Two Cultures’ of which C.P. Snow and others have worried so much in print. The two cultures are the culture of the literary intellectuals and the culture of the scientists and technicians. This gap has also been presented, not quite correctly, as the gap between the humanists and the soulless savants. It had been a wide and uncommunicating gap for a long while, and there was real fear that it was so abysmal a gap that the whole modern world might fall into it and be lost.

  There were and are other gaps: between the elites and the commoners (that the commoners are frequently of more ability than the elites does not close the gap); the gaps between the rulers and the ruled, between the talented and the deprived, between the rich and the poor, between liberals and conservatives, between introverts and extroverts, between morning people and evening people, between orientals and occidentals, between colors and between races, between parties and between persuasions, between rationalists and romantics, between integrists and decadents, between materialists and transcendentalists, between relativists and absolutists, between young and old, between men and women. (These latter two gaps are minor ones, have never amounted to much, and are placed here merely to round off the list.)

  At one time I believed that the gap between the ‘Two Cultures’, between the literary and arty folks on the one hand and the scientific and technological folks on the other, was so serious that it might bring down all civilization. Well, it was and it is; and something is going to bring down that apparatus one of these days. But this gap has narrowed a little bit now, becoming extremely productive in its narrowing; and it might be better if it doesn't narrow too much or close absolutely.

  I believed that a field that I work in, Science Fiction, had a call to bridge this gap between the literary and the scientific, and to bring about a synthesis. It still has that call, and it responds to it with some effect. And, however it has happened, the yawning gap has narrowed till it is a lively spark-gap and there is a perpetual interchange between the two cultures. “They communicate as by fire.” It is a pleasant and pregnant business, and the modern world is in but slight immediate danger of tumbling into that gap and being lost.

  In their prototypical golden age, the old Greeks were not greatly bothered by a gap between the ‘Two Cultures’. They were not bothered very much by any gaps at all. They did not distinguish between the lively arts and the lively sciences. All of them, arts and sciences together, were Musics, provinces of the Muses. Flute-playing, comedy, tragedy, lyric poetry, dance, love poetry, heroic hymns, and epic poetry were all musics. So were history and physics and arithmetic and geometry and politics and warfare and astronomy, every one of them a music. Horsemanship, cookery, wine-making, olive-culture, painting, sculpture, annals-writing, ship-building, wrestling, group-singing, pottery-making, rhetoric, council, cloth-weaving, harbor-dredging, philosophy-constructing, coin-minting, festival-celebration, marketing and trading, archery, hunting and fowling and fishing, verse-recitation, ox-driving, love-making, temple-worship, map
-drawing, each one of them was a music assigned somewhere to the wide provinces of one or another of the nine muses. And ‘Elegance’, a thing that defies definition and which covers a multitude of failings and successes, was a certified music. It still is.

  Almost unnoticed, even though with considerable sound and stir, this condition is approaching again today. Have you not noticed that molecular biology has become a music? Haven't you seen that all the sub-atomic stuff is the most deeply orchestrated music ever? Have you not glimpsed that even sociology, that ugly ruck-duckling, has become at least half a music? And it is clear that group and personal scenarios have become real musics in a multitude of cases, and that they may soon become so in the majority.

  (What? We are in a golden age, with the parrot sickness rampant? A golden age, with long drawn-out lynchings and the attempt to compel every person in the country to touch hand to the hanging ropes? We suffer day-darkening incursions of stink-bugs, and you say that we are in a golden age? Yes, we are. These unpleasant details will pass, just as the sun and the moon will pass.)

  This new or returned condition of the narrowed gaps represents a synthesis, but the synthesis is imperfect by requirement. It can't be a complete merging or dilution. It doesn't work towards a total lessening of tension (the bows and the limbs are not unstrung). It's simply the case that the gaps, once so wide as to be unintelligible and irrational, have now narrowed to communicating gaps, to spark-gaps. They are electric and enlivening and they are laced with continuing painted lightning. And the lightnings reveal with quick clearness the shapes and functions of the world and its societies.

  About the ‘functions’ of the societies, though, there are several depths of meaning. In all the social relationships there are analogs to the mathematical functions of calculus. Every person or group is “a magnitude so related to other magnitudes that to values of the latter there correspond values of the former.” For we do have integral societies that follow many of the workings of Integral Calculus. We do have differential societies that exhibit the main relationships of the Differential Calculus. We even have tensor societies that find some correspondences in Tensor Calculus. A working society may show patterns right out of Boolean Algebra or Matrix Algebra or Riemann Geometry, or out of Fuch's Theorem or Christoffel Symbol or Born-Mayer Equation mathematics.

  Life imitates art, yes. But just as strongly does life imitate science and mathematics. It imitates them to the extent that they have become lively and popular, to the extent that they have become contemporary musics. And there are today many thousands of high-school-aged persons who absorb the more intricate and flexible mathematics as if they were tunes to be played or sung, or peanuts to be gobbled. Kids are smarter than they used to be. They got smarter all at once, just the other day, the day that the golden age began. There really is this very wide recognition and acceptance, this ease of encounter with what were once considered difficult subjects. The tricky and pleasing mathematics aren't as new as all that, but the realization and enjoyment of them on a wide basis is new.

  This is the case with many of the sciences and arts and expressions generally. It isn't enough that a science be honest and solid and verifiable for it to be an integer of the golden age. It also must be a lively science. It must be a realized science. It must be realized by enough of the people to give a tone to the scene, for the people and their scenes are the components of the golden age. And many of the fields of science (and of art, and of unaffiliated music) are now being realized by very broad segments of the people.

  But the various gaps have narrowed nicely. The sparky and communicating lightning across a dozen gaps, across fifty of them, had been a strong force in transmuting the trash into gold for a new age. And just what is this trash that is being worked upon, and what is so special and splendid about it?

  It's nostalgic trash, all the better part of it. That's one test of the quality of trash: that it be remembered with affection, and that it be remembered as better than it really was.

  It has been said that our present age will not be remembered at all: that it will not be remembered since that would be no more than a nostalgia for a nostalgia, since ours is a backward-looking age with no quality of its own. But that isn't the case of it at all. Nostalgia is the remembering of one's depth, and the real transmuting-nostalgia is one of the most amazing of all chemical or alchemical actions. And it is in no way new, or unique to our own age.

  There must have been a lot of layers of transmuting-nostalgia in Homer: the camp-fire and palace-fire smoke of many retellings and reworkings of the material. There must have been the remembering of it as better than it was, and then the making of it better than it was. There must be a lot of layers of transmuting-nostalgia in anything that comes through canny and clear. These layers are the living roots, and the bedamned and bedazzled arts and styles and lives and sciences will not grow out of anything else.

  (You call this a golden age when there are psychedelic hot poster colors yipping all over the place? Yes, maybe so.) Let's look at that for a minute. They would not have colors at all if they were not given to them from above. Sometimes it is art that imitates nature, and the colors and shapes of nature did begin to change before they changed in art or in pseudo-art. Partly it is that the new colors have appeared as a consequence of the new polluted or enriched atmosphere, partly as a consequence of heavier fertilizer on the land than ever before. It's the case also that new varieties of plants have brought new shapes and colors; and it is possibly the case that the human range of color vision has widened a bit. We become conscious of new color areas, and then we are able to see them. A man who studies such things tells me that this has really happened.

  Wheat fields are of new colors nowayears, or richer and hotter and perhaps of more psychedelic colors, than they were before Kaw and Concho and other present generation wheats appeared. Many of the grapes are now in hot poster colors, Red Amber, Blue Lake, Brighton, Grenache, Delaware. Hybrid field corn shows a stranger green and yellow every year. The sweet clovers and alfalfas are more vivid with every new breed. Man-directed mutations along with natural mutations have been busy. And there are things growing where they never grew before. The hues of the new hot-color art are burlesques of new natural hues, and their humor is widely appreciated. They have shortened the years that it normally takes for eyes to see new colors.

  But what is this trash and pulp-stuff that is the fecundating manure of the golden age? Old comic strips and automobiles, collection-item ice cream chairs and pluto water bottles, amusement parks as they were and as they are, water sports and cross-linked polyethylene materials, card games, board games, table games and machine games, alleys and courts and diamonds and fields, Get-and-Go stores that are instant worlds, quasars and quantums and quarks, books abounding in never-fail fountains (not really believing that they are obsolete), fandoms and fermions, money-green as the ever-new hot psychedelic color, murals and welded sculpture, nutshell genetics and psychologies and languages and medical biologies, skits and plays, hairy horse jokes and shaggy people jokes, music and anti-music (when particles of each come together they annihilate each other), dune buggies and motor scooters, drinking parties and flaking parties, work, worth, wandering, gadgetry and quackery, and sudden dazzling quality and pleasure in everything looming up over the cheerful wastelands, these are some of the jeweled and gimcrack bits that are worked into the golden mosaic.

  TV lives largely on old movies from the poverty days, being now too rich to afford creativity of its own. Once, for many years, there were more than three hundred full-length feature movies made every year, a new movie for every day; and many of these were very vigorous and highly original. And they weren't too bad. A persistent selection of the worst of them (always the worst of them) gets by today in spite of poor setting and distraction. Certainly they were trash, but they were noble trash; and they have much more to offer than their own reproduction. And the finest of them, the old silents, are seldom reproduced at all. But the cinema wa
s born only yesterday, and its trash cannot go back as far as that of other musics. It provided a base that is being transmuted into new and experimental live drama, TV, and new films, much of it superior stuff, golden rehash for the golden age. And there are absolutely new notes born out of the old.

  Consider three trash or pulp fields of the hard and soft sciences: Darwinism, Marxism, Freudism. These three things were real pulp theories, but transmuting-nostalgia has kept them working like grist mills.

  (Junk-metal sculpture, this is a golden age? No, no, you don't understand. You let it stand out in the weather for a few seasons. Then you throw away the sculpture and keep the rust.)

  Why has Darwinism, an inferior and comparatively late form of evolutionism, taken and held the stage for more than a century? Oh, somehow Darwin made evolution into one of the lively sciences, and it hadn't been lively before.

  “The ousel and the throstlecock, chief music of our May.” Now we begin to get the idea. Poetry has been plucked bare. Rime is gone, and we loved rime. Re-read Palgrave's Golden Treasury to see just how bad good rimed poetry can be, but it survived that and died of something else centuries later. Metre is gone from poetry, and ordered rhythm. The old imagery is all gone, and the evocation of queer birds caught on the wing. What is left in poetry then? Only the poetry itself, some of it very bad, some of it good, some of it perversely excellent, shredded and strewn gold.

  And rime isn't gone from everything, only from poetry. In molecular biology there are ringing concords that are absolutely like the rimes of old verse.

  “Eating ortolans to the sound of soft music.” That's a setting for golden stuff. Whatever happened to painting? It suffered a number of false pregnancies and miscarriages. It fell into every sort of disrepute and incoherence and sickness. But, now and locally, it is in pretty good health. Most of the diseases had been European ones, French and Italian sicknesses and Dutch Elm diseases. But now the European influence isn't strong, except at second hand. The trash and pulp that contemporary American painting is growing out of is mostly American trash and pulp. And it is vitalizing stuff.