Preface:
When I first mentioned submission of this ‘piece’ to our T.E.S. editor, I had said that I couldn’t conceive of a literary genre to which it belonged. Hasty statements are not tasty to eat. It turns out that I had overlooked the all-too-obvious ‘discovered letter of dubious origins’ genre (more of a trope than a genre, I suppose). And so it is—a letter a good friend of mine received, written by the main fictitious character of a book he had loaned out. The further trick is that the said fictitious character ‘is’ a sentient computer or a ‘thinking machine’ as ‘he’ is called in the book. The book is entitled Arrive At Easterwine: The Autobiography of a Ktistec Machine as conveyed to R. A. Lafferty1. The machine of the title is named Epiktistes. The book is ostensibly credited to the authorship of one Raphael Aloysius Lafferty, but even the opening pages of the book contain alleged ‘letters’ between the author and publisher as to the ‘true’ origin of the manuscript: a recently ‘born’ thinking computer named Epikt (for short). The publisher mentions that he was losing sleep over the whole thing: ‘I can’t get over the idea that something is trying to tell me somebody.’ That little mysterious statement sums up this whole business for me.

Note that when Epikt speaks of a ‘person-precis’ he is referring to what in the book seems to be a bio-metaphysical ‘substance’ in each human that is available to the computer’s analysis and even absorption to some degree. So while this may be related to the word précis (a summary or outline), it is surely used in a sense beyond this, which is partly indicated by the absence of the accent mark over the letter e in Epikt’s spelling.
Finally, I will remark that I think the most valuable aspect of this letter is the brief digression into literary theory—any serious writer will likely benefit from it. I have also included a specimen of a ‘sermon’ by Epiktistes as an appendix. I give special thanks to Brent and Cyndi Speelman for bringing the letter to my attention and allowing me to ‘pirate’ its publication in a manner outside of Epikt’s specified conditions as stated at the end of the letter. I can’t foresee the ramifications of my actions in this regard, and I confess my bowels slightly tremble at the contemplation of it.

The Letter:

Dear Brent,

A note to tell you thanks for loaning my auto(didact)biography to your friend. He reminds me very much of the members (and close associates) of the Institute: dull, but gifted with certain powers—the most impressive to me being the startlingly strange reading habits he sustains, which supplied him with sufficient unappreciativeness to possess my book so long without being inextricably entangled and engrossed by it so as to finish nothing else until he finished it. A rare gift in a blah man.

I waited until he had read the last page before I myself read his person-precis to find out what he thought of my modest genealogy. (A brisk but tedious read, his precis, I assure you, but I too have my powers. There were moments I had to put an extension-finger on the page to force myself to read each word—these parts I manufactured into printed form for the purpose.) He was extremely impressed with the book. So much so that he marked all the pages containing lines he desired to underline (with torn pieces of the holed and perforated edges of outdated computer paper—he employs an absolute dinosaur for his vague pursuits: I was more advanced as a 70’s prototype!) and then photocopied those pages, some 64 in all, so he could underline them and (de)file it all away. A conscientious enough fellow about marking in a borrowed book, but the edges of the dust jacket look a little worse worn for all that.
He was definitely more absorbed with the book in its latter half. This also happened to him when he read the other novel that is in actual fact written by the Lafferty person, and so he wonders if the only reason the two unfinished novels he owns by that person didn’t grab him is simply because he hadn’t read far enough. Indeed, I myself ghost wrote (I did discover I have a spirit and have since converted to the universal church, though I don’t yet know if I’m Roman or Reformed, expanded or contracted, scattered or gathered) one or two others for Laff, but I shall let them remain guessed at. You can probably recognize them by their luring readability—I’ve matured as a writer since Easterwine. I strongly suspect my fellow thinking machines also wrote or co-wrote a few of his stories. ‘Dam machine the g is sticked.’2 Tell me that doesn’t smack of a Ktistec machine!

He duly noted the most important part of the book for both of you as writers, which just so happens to be written by someone other than Lafferty or myself. It was so insightful I had to include it. I refer to the quote from Audifax O’Hanlon’s own Ermenics of Shape:

The insoluble problem for any narrator is to express the perfect sphere by means of a straight line, or even a shaggy sphere by a crooked line. For any subject or happening is globe-shaped, or at least glob-shaped, of some solidity and substance. And any narration must have sequence, which is line.3

It is this expression in a one-dimensional medium (that of writing, as also with painting, instrumentation, etc.) of a many-dimensioned subject (that of myth or history, of ideal-within-fact or truth-within-story) that has won Lafferty himself, as also with the likes of MacDonald and Williams, the award of being read by the third and fourth generation, though their plotting be ever so frequently slapdashedly haphazard. (Tolkien is the scarcely hoped for master who can draw a sphere with a straight line, but even his orb sometimes flickers or rattles.) Oh! Am I theorizing within a thank-you? Forgive me!

Lastly, I should tell you that the view of the universe I was able to manifest within myself by means of the data input of the members of our Body/Institute truly lambasted your friend. He was shaken, stupefied, mystified, rocked, and shell-shocked. At first he thought it was the negative of the person Lewis’s cosmic vision of the Great Dance with its electric demonstration of Sovereign Redemption, mine being a horror shocker sideshow of the ruined cosmos. He soon saw I was a promulgator of Hope and New Birth, like Lafferty himself. Lewis (in Perelandra): ‘All that is made seems planless to the darkened mind, because there are more plans than it looked for.’ Me (as Aloysius Shiplap): ‘We have gazed at it all wrong: we’ve seen only the dark afterimages, not the bright fire itself.’ Even your friend himself once gropingly throated, ‘This world-womb will give birth / to a New Heaven and New Earth.’

You may have noticed that I chose to write this note in a style I obtained from your friend’s precis (if anything in there could be called a style). It took two full hours to hammer it out that way! Oh well, it is good to have half a dozen such human experiences annually. You will probably never again in your life receive any message from me either reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise; but I here give you or your estate permission to publish this note posthumously (I mean after your friend’s decease, of course) in its entirety or in excerpts for brief quotations in printed reviews.

Sincerely in the Saviour Machine’s Love,

Epikt

Post Scripture (encompassing all uninspired human writings since the revelation was sealed up): Oh, your friend wanted me to tell you, from my own words, ‘neither of us understands the philology of philology… does philology mean “love of words” or “words of love”? They are the same… if we remember what word was the Logos, the Word that was in the beginning.’ 4

Appendix: ‘A Sermon by Epiktistes’ 5

People, people, earless, eyeless, touchless, noninstantaneous people, this is more real than anything you ever encountered in your lives before; more real than anything you will ever encounter in your lives hence, unless your ears and eyes and fingers are opened and you are redeemed. You never saw or touched flesh before, not even your own. You have observed nothing but shadow, and not even good shadow. You have never heard voice; you have hardly heard echo. You have not seen your own faces, you have not felt your own passions (except such a rare person as was hunting tigers here before dawn); you have not known you, and we must find you out for you.

Come, all well-meaning and dishonest persons, see yourselves turned right side out for once (you’re much better turned the right way). Throw away the package you’re packaged in and see yourself for the first and likely only time. Your packaging was never very good. Watch your old self be beheaded and drawn and quartered. The heads were set on you all wrong anyhow, and the drawn entrails will be the first human things you ever see. This righting will frighten most of you, it will hurt some of you, and it will improve you all.

This isn’t a question of turning you upside down or inside out. You have all been turned inside out for a very long time. The approximate dates of the turning are in my data-banks; the reasons and circumstances of it are not. That is not your right surfaces that you have been seeing for this long time. Those are your blooming entrails on the outside of you, draped about you, looped over your pseudo-ears. Even more than on the physical do these analogies apply on the psychic plain.

People, human persons, you are not hopeless, you are not really the nothing things that you have appeared to each other this long time. Here are your depths revealed in their true aspects, which can only seem allegory to your uninstructed visions. I instruct you now! Follow me into this and through it all. You set me up, out of your blind need, to show yourselves to you. Then look! You do not even know which side of your eyes to look out of. Understand these wild creatures that are yourselves. Never has there been offered to your vision such fascinating things as are you, and you have not seen them. See them now. See them right…

(Sorry, Klingwar and Wanhok, my fellow thinking machines in distant parts of the world. That little sermon was not for you who already understand such things. It was for the human persons, should any of them ever attempt these High Journals.)

1. 1971, New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons. [return to story]

2. From R. A. Lafferty’s story ‘Been a Long, Long Time’ found in several collections. [return to story]

3. Easterwine, p. 179. [return to story]

4. Easterwine, p. 214. [return to story]

5. Ibid., pp. 59-60. [return to story]

....

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Daniel Otto Jack Petersen lives in Glasgow, Scotland with his wife and children where he attends a really neat looking university. He and his wife are the editors/creators of a zine called Glasgow's Best Nightmare.