Pulling the Hole in After You

I love to sail the ocean quaint,

I love the waves that rush-o.

I love to paint with sightless paint,

I love to whack my brush-o.

"Ballad of Invisible Alfred"

Today, I was thinking about Lafferty’s image of pulling the hole in after yourself and its connection, in his imagination, to the mouth. The phrase recurs across his writings, often looking lighthearted, but it rarely is. It usually indexes metaphysical terror.

But what kind of metaphysical terror? Not materialism. It is not the Lucretian void—a passive emptiness that allows atoms to swerve through space. It is stranger, closer to a quantum vacuum—being shot through with holes that, like so many hellmouths, worm their way through all of postlapsarian creation, never reaching total negation.

Lafferty shows us what this looks like at the end of Arrive at Easterwine (1971)

The universe, new seen, grew in power and clarity, and ghastliness.

“It’s still a sphere,” Gregory growled stubbornly. “A little bit rough, but a sphere.” But Gregory had slipped and shrunken. For the moment he was no giant. He had reached his limit, and perhaps his minutes as director were numbered.

“It’s still a rotten apple?” Glasser gasped with a passion unusual to him. “Oh, oh, why have apples been the symbol both of the loss and the search? Oh, God of the gutted glob! The holes in it, the holes in it, the unfathomable abysses, the searing absences. What thing cries out of its absences? How will it be fulfilled?”

“It’s a sponge,” said Cogsworth through closed teeth. “How sponges must suffer!”

"It’s a cheese,” Valery offered hysterically, “rotted cheese and full of holes. A whole cosmos of maggotty cheese, turned green in its taint and rot.”

Food. Holes. Mouths.

If you ask me, the most frightening “nothingness” villain in Lafferty’s novels is not the well-known one, Ouden. It is Invisible Alfred in Serpent's Egg (1987). Ouden is an idol, but Invisible Alfred is something far more insidious.

Recall that Invisible Alfred was not born invisible. He claims to have spent a thousand years in a one-hundred-gallon drum of invisible paint, which granted him near-invisibility. This, of course, links him with the other imprisoned devils in Lafferty’s fiction who are eventually released. It is practically a Law of Lafferty that

“The Earth had had endemic devils for many millennia and had built up a certain resistance to them. But the devil-invasions would be epidemics as they came to the worlds that did not have the devil experience.”

It is also a Law of Lafferty that we should not trust what devils tell us about themselves.

Like the masterminding devil Pottscamp in Past Master (1968), Invisible Alfred is at first mistaken for a potential friend. Only gradually does the reader understand how sinister he is. Poor Invisible Alfred, the guy who got trapped in a barrel. On a first reading of Serpent’s Egg, it is almost impossible to recognize that Alfred’s invisibility ties him to the Catholic idea of evil as privation.

Unlike Ouden, Alfred’s arrival doesn’t begin with big, booming postures—though he builds up to them, eventually claiming to be a prophet. The important part is that he does not announce himself as a terror. Real terrors in Lafferty usually don't. And unlike Ouden, you cannot laugh Invisible Alfred away. “We laugh you off the scene,” says Paul-Thomas to Ouden.

Of Invisible Alfred, Lafferty writes,

“[he] made three more numinous and prophetic speeches to three other multitudes of people that day, but they weren't successes. More and more people were laughing at him, and he was completely discredited. He didn't seem discouraged though. He just closed his eyes and mouth and went away. Or else he did not go away.”

The only visible parts of Invisible Alfred are his eyes and mouth—until he shuts them both, at which point he blinks out of existence. Or else he doesn’t.

I think he can’t. He isn’t Ouden, because Ouden is pure nothingness, and pure nothingness cannot exist. Invisible Alfred’s mouth does exist.

At first, the reader might think Alfred is just another of Lafferty’s grotesques, but it turns out that he is the Supreme Head of Lafferty’s most chilling Gnostic secret society, The Kangaroo. He will slaughter the children whom Lafferty has positioned the reader to care about. They are a version of the Dulanty children from The Reefs of Earth (1968) who will not get to remake the world—"And opposed to them, only the defenseless World!"—because they will be dead and because the world of Serpent’s Egg is on the offense.

Now I will say what gets said a lot about Lafferty because it is true. While Lafferty’s deaths are often violent, they are just as often exuberant—joyful, even. But Invisible Alfred’s murders are not like this at all. There is zero joy here. (Watch for the word joy in the upcoming passage and how devastating it is.). Alfred's killing of the supergenius golden ape Axel and the supergenius little Lord Randal is about as nightmarish as Lafferty gets:

“Axel woke up in total joy and sprung to his feet. He had nearly a second of happy realization, and he opened his mouth to shout. But no shout came from his mouth. One of those short, sharp-bladed Dolophonoi knives, seeming to move by itself, buried itself in Axel's throat, and the ten-year-old Golden Ape fell dead.

But the short knife, still seeming to move by itself, withdrew from the red-running throat of Axel and hovered in the air seeking further prey.

"I know you now, I'll have you now!" Lord Randal cried and went fearlessly after the dancing knife. Lord Randal's own knife had flicked out and stabbed at an unseen something. But the dancing knife found Lord Randal's throat just as it had found Axel's. And Lord Randal fell dead.”

This dialectic—laughter and privation—is the hole you pull in after you. It's the conceptual knot.

From a Catholic eschatological perspective, the image is troubling. Catholic teaching envisions an eschatological fulfillment in which creation is renewed in the resurrection—a reordering, not an erasure, of existence. The destiny of the world is transformation and reconciliation with God, not dissolution into absolute nothingness. And yet, here is Invisible Alfred in full mania, speaking with the devilish voice of Pottscamp who I think ventriloquizes Ouden:

“. . . all voices on Earth and in the Ocean praise me whenever they sound, whether they intend it or not. All of them rebound to my glory.”

The sightless paint in Alfred’s ballad—“I love to paint with sightless paint, I love to whack my brush-o”—opens the hole that you pull in after yourself. And the final “o” in brush-o is the O in Ouden. And we know what holds the brush.

Returning to Arrive at Easterwine, it is perhaps surprising that—of all the members of the Institute for Impure Science—it is Glasser, the man without genius, who delivers the novel’s most profound line:

"What thing cries out of its absences? How will it be fulfilled?”

Here is a chart that compiles every example of the phrase I know of in Lafferty’s work:

Title	Circumstances	Quote	Implication
“And Walk Now Gently Through the Fire"	A faction called the “Unstructured Scriveners” (or Unmakers) celebrates humanity’s collapse as a masterwork of self-negation.	“The second greatest masterwork of man was the unstructuring of man himself… the going into the hole and pulling the hole in after him.”	Total self-annihilation, erasing not only identity but the void left behind.  Humanity’s achievement is nihilistic unmaking.
“What’s the Name of That Town?”	Gregory Smirnov the Tele-Pantographic Distorter to erase a city’s destruction from collective memory—then he erases his own memory of doing so.	“He does not recognize or remember it even now. It was his job to pull in the hole after them all.”	Absolute cover-up: not just the event but the memory of erasure itself is erased.
Aurelia	Talking about the “Big Bang” and God, Cousin Clootie says that all existence will revert to nothingness.	“It all begins at zero, and it all returns to zero… They will disappear into the hole… and pull the hole in after one.”	Cosmic scale of obliteration: the universe erasing itself.
Dotty, Chapter 5	Dotty watches small crabs and sand-dwellers sealing their burrow holes behind them as they retreat underground.	“They scoot sideways into holes and pull the holes in after them… They close it after them.”	Innocent reflection on erasure of trace. This is perhaps the origin of the image for Lafferty, perhaps something he saw on family vacation in Galveston. The vortex of sand seems to fit the way the image works in his writing more than an Acme-style portable hole.
Past Master,  Chapter 10	Thomas More discovers that powerful “Programmed Persons” plan to annihilate all life—and even the memory that life ever existed.	“We will pull the hole in after us… What is not known to be is not. And what is not has never been.”	Ultimate, universe-wide negation.- Erasure so absolute that it nullifies the very fact that anything once existed.- Apocalyptic and diabolical finality.
Sindbad: The 13th Voyage, Chapter 3	Sindbad’s former student boasts of being a “perfect spy” who can leave no trace behind, surpassing even Sindbad’s teachings.	“…then I left; and I pulled in the hole after me. For I am the perfect spy, and you are not.”	- Espionage-level self-erasure: removing all memory or evidence of one’s presence.- Elevates disappearing into an art form of total negation.
Spance Chantey,  Chapter 3	Captain Roadstrum and crew encounter a black sun that “swallows” everything, sealing off even time and memory.	“It drew in whole and pulled the hole in after it… Use but a thumb to gull the gulping glutton there!”	Cosmic devouring: the sun not only consumes matter/time but closes the void behind it