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On Valentine's Day, 2004, I attended Paul Laffoley's slide
show at Melrose Light Space, a hip art gallery tucked away
unobtrusively on the second floor of a Hollywood strip mall,
the entire bottom floor of which was populated by abandoned
store fronts. The slide show represented an overview of Laffoley's
idiosyncratic paintings stretching back well over thirty years.
Each slide invariably triggered in Laffoley's mind a fascinating
five-minute long monologue about the unusual circumstances
under which the painting was conceived and the metaphysical
and/or scientific theories that inspired it. Eighty slides
were included in the show. By the end of the evening, Laffoley
had discussed only about half of them.
Later
in the evening, I asked Laffoley what exact percentage these
paintings represented in terms of his entire corpus of work.
He replied, "About ten percent." This suggests, of course,
that he's completed somewhere around 800 paintings in his
lifetime, the most celebrated of which have been featured
in over 300 exhibitions both nationally and abroad. This would
be an impressive body of work for any artist, but particularly
for someone whose paintings are as rich in detail as Laffoley's.
Laffoley,
an architect by trade, aspires to create paintings that meld
both the Dionysian (the purely emotional) with the Apollonian
(the purely rational), thus managing to capture the anarchic
spirit of a Jackson Pollock within the grid-like confines
of an architectural blueprint - a blueprint conceived in the
mind of a mad genius obsessed with building only the impossible.
Such "impossible" projects include a fully functional time
machine called the "Geochronmechane," an interactive painting
called the "Thanaton" that helps the viewer project his etheric
body into the astral realms, a single family farm designed
to resemble the ten Sephiroth and twenty-two paths of the
Kabala (complete with trees growing upside down beneath the
ground in order to replicate the dark side of the Tree of
Life), an immense spherical house composed of genetically-engineered
vegetation, and a Christian fundamentalist theme park built
in the shape of the Star of David.
After
the show, I accompanied Laffoley back to CSU Fullerton where
he was serving as the visiting Artist-in-Residence. During
the car ride we touched upon numerous other impossible topics.
These topics happened to include Laffoley's most important
influences, his pantheon of "mephitic models": Paul Laffoley,
Sr., R. Buckminster Fuller, Orfeo Angelucci, Leon Theremin,
Nikola Tesla, Richard Upton Pickman, H.P. Lovecraft, and Satan
himself.
The
interview concluded in Laffoley's temporary studio in Santa
Ana where he was hard at work on his latest painting, "Pickman's
Mephitic Models," based on the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft.
The Grand Central Art Gallery in Santa Ana specifically commissioned
the painting in order to include it as the centerpiece of
their ambitious "100 Artists See Satan" exhibit, which ran
from July 3rd to September 19th in 2004.
(The painting can be seen at: www.grandcentralartcenter.com/gcacPages/Artists/
100ArtistSeeSatan/100Artists_P_07.html#laffoley as well
as in a highly recommended book entitled 100 Artists See
Satan.)
Our
conversation about the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft at the very
end of this interview occurred while Laffoley was putting
the finishing touches on the marginalia that surrounds the
painting. Pickman's central images, interpreted by the artist
Arnold Clapman, had yet to be included.
RG:
Robert Guffey
PL:
Paul Laffoley
RG:
During your lecture I noticed a lot of the references you
made to certain esoteric scholars. More than once you mentioned
Manly P. Hall [author of The Secret Teachings of All Ages
and numerous other works of occult philosophy] and C.W. Leadbeater
[author of The Hidden Side of Freemasonry and other
Theosophical texts]. You mentioned Theosophy a lot as well.
How did you first come upon these alternative systems of thought?
PL:
To me they were part of what growing up in New England was
all about.
RG:
Were there a lot of people in New England who were into C.W.
Leadbeater?
PL:
Sure, yeah. My father knew all about this stuff. I owe a lot
of what I'm doing, I think, to him. I'm sort of continuing
my father's work.
RG:
What did your father do?
PL:
He was a banker. He was the president of the Cambridge Trust
Company, the head of the trust department, and he taught classes
at the Harvard Business School. And he was a member of the
Harvard Faculty Club, which I am, too, because what I did
is... I have the same name as my father, only Jr. So I kept
paying the bills, and now they must think there's a prof walking
around that's 130. I like going there to eat. It's nice.
RG:
Your father was a medium, wasn't he?
PL:
Yes. Of course, I didn't know him when he was extremely young.
I was born rather late in his life, in his mid-40s. And so
what he did up until the time he was 15, I think probably
from age 12 to 15, my grandfather made him demonstrate mediumistic
powers at the Exeter Street Theater, the first Spiritualist
church in the United States. It's near Coply Square. The Exeter
Street Theater is the place where William James found Leonora
Piper, the medium he called the White Crow. The one that wasn't
a phony. In other words, the exception to the rule.
At
15 he revolted against his father like any teenager, and said,
"I'm out of here! What are you doing to me?" He thought he
wouldn't be involved in that kind of stuff for the rest of
his life. He just wanted to make money. He was one of those
people who took over the family responsibility. His own father
was pretty irresponsible with money and borrowed from people
all the time.
You
know, he was always saying I'd end up like my grandfather.
Okay. My grandfather was an architect, I'm an architect. It's
true, certain characteristics are similar. But anyway, my
father became super-responsible. You know, he was the kind
of person that absorbs all responsibility in the family, and
then everybody else can act like a child in relation to him.
So then, when he reached his majority, he was the head of
the family. Everybody depended upon him. He went into a very
uptight appearance; he would wear Chesterfield coats to work,
Homburg hats, really getting into the whole thing. He knew
people like Oscar Levant. He loved New York. He wanted to
live there.
He
was always upset that my mother didn't want to live in New
York. Because he said he wanted to live in a hotel and not
have to mow the lawn and all that. In other words, he never
liked sports clothes, he always liked to be dressed up formally,
24/7. And he drove big cars and, you know, just loved to act
the banker. He was also a lawyer in his bank and specialized
in tax law. He would have to do the tax returns for all the
Harvard profs because they were buffaloed by that kind of
reasoning. Professors in the economics department, even they
knew nothing about it.
He
developed inventions too. And this was the time just before
the patent office would allow ideas and systems to be patented.
When computers came along it was possible to patent ways of
using them, what we now call programming. Before that it had
to be a gizmo, a gadget that you could put on a table. Now,
of course, that's untrue. And today the patent office is obsolete.
You just take whatever you do, tool up, and start production
for six months. At the end of the six months you put the data
on all the computer inputs all over the world and you got
your business. You can make all your money, and then people
can steal it, but by then it doesn't matter because you've
made the money up front and you avoid wasting money in lawsuits.
He had all these kinds of ideas years ahead of others.
But
he had this quirky thing of not believing in gravity. And
giving me a constant headache about that one. He would say
if I showed any interest in gravity, I was becoming a dupe
of the system. He could see indications I was beginning to
believe in it.
RG:
What indications?
PL:
Well, I would say, "Why don't you actually take some courses
in physics instead of saying this?" But he would never do
it. Businessmen for some reason or other, think, because they're
successful in a single direction, that they know everything.
You know what I mean? You ever meet people like that?
RG:
Yes.
PL:
The Babson Institute, which is now an actual university, was
started by this guy who also had a problem with believing
in gravity. And so he started the Babson Institute in New
Boston, New Hampshire, which then moved to Gloucester. Each
year they have a competition of one thousand dollars for one
thousand words of an essay on gravity. That's the way they
do it. Stephen Hawking won it one year with his black hole
stuff. It's keeping an open mind on whether gravity exists
or not. I think my father believed this because … when
the wind blew on him, he'd get angry, because it was something
he couldn't control. He was afraid of being out of control.
Forms of energy from nature gave my father trouble. He refused
to believe he was going to die. He had these weird delusions.
It's amazing. Along with all the great thoughts, he had all
this funny stuff.
So,
as a kid, I was getting information in areas that no one else
was getting. I think that was one of the reasons my mother
didn't want me to go to school too soon. Because I would be
beaten to a pulp, you know, if I walked down the street and
said there was no such thing as gravity. Kids would say, "Oh
yeah? I'll show you gravity," and a rock would drop on your
head.
RG:
Did your dad have an alternate theory of gravity?
PL:
Yes. In other words, he thought it was like a push, which
is very similar to certain things that Descartes thought about,
such as his vortex theory. My father would conclude his dissertations
by saying, "Of course, Einstein never believed in gravity.
It was a distortion of space." And so my father couldn't believe
that an attraction at a distance was a reality.
RG:
You know, Jonathan Swift didn't believe in gravity either.
He said that Newton had discovered levity, not gravity.
PL:
Yeah, all this stuff worked into the mix. You know, in the
suburbs, most people believe in gravity, but they don't have
much of a sense of humor.
RG:
Of course.
PL:
And so, to have that radical a mind in that bourgeois-looking
body was really hard for a lot of people to take, because,
when my mother would want to have people over she'd tell him,
"Don't start with the gravity stuff." And then he would invariably
do this and the guests would look at each other and say, "Well,
I think it's time to go now."
RG:
So was that the only taboo subject he was into?
PL:
No, no, there were other things. But this was the big one.
He felt passionately invested in the concept.
RG:
Have you come to the conclusion that he was right?
PL:
Well, I met a guy who had the same theory and wrote a book
about it. His name is Walter C. Wright Jr. His book is called
Gravity Is a Push. I wrote to him and told him about
my father, and he said he wished he'd met him. My father died
quite a while ago. This guy has a more cogent presentation
than my father did about it being a push. But he had the same
basic belief, that the idea of magnetism attracting something
was not the reason why the effects of what we call gravity
occur.
RG:
There's this eccentric guy who used to be in Mensa. His name
is Ralph René, and he wrote a book [The Last Skeptic
of Science] that had a whole chapter on that exact theory.
It's the kind of book that's bound with masking tape. But,
you know, it seemed plausible.
PL:
Yeah. My father was an extremely brilliant man. I consider
him a genius, and so he probably could have joined Mensa.
But why? I got in it with a 79 I.Q. and the first day I said,
"I'm getting the hell out of here quick!" They're all losers.
All they do is talk about their IQ. [Laughs]
RG:
In your lecture you mentioned the medallion you were given
as a child, the one with the swastika and the Star of David
on it.
[In
his essay "Disco Volante," Laffoley writes that he had been
"regaled since 1947 by stories of riding in flying saucers
by the man who came to cut our bushes at my family home in
Belmont, Massachusetts" (Laffoley 24). This man was named
Giuseppe Conti. On Laffoley's fifteenth birthday, Conti gave
him a medallion composed of a swastika circumscribed by a
Star of David. Conti claimed the medallion was extraterrestrial
in origin. Ten years later, the medallion was stolen from
Laffoley on the streets of Paris by a man who identified himself
as "Claude Vorilhon." Laffoley wouldn't see the medallion
again until the mid-'90s when he happened to come across a
photograph of UFO cult leader Claude Vorilhon in a book entitled
Kooks by Donna Kossy. In the photo, Vorilhon is wearing
the very same medallion around his neck. Laffoley believed
the medallion's symbol represented "the reconciliation of
opposites."]
PL:
Yes, right.
RG:
And you tied that into the reconciliation of opposites. It
sounds like your father was a kind of yin-yang situation as
well. He was working at Harvard, but meanwhile he was a medium.
He was straddling two worlds.
PL:
Yeah. He knew Gardner Murphy, who went to Topeka, Kansas to
be the head of a psychical research thing. But at the time
that he knew him he was a graduate student at both Columbia
and Harvard and worked with the American Psychical Research
Foundation in New York. And so they got together and put Troland's
notes together [L.T. Troland, a Harvard psychology professor
who performed a number of experiments involving telepathy
in the 1920's]. He was doing four volumes. The final one was
the ultimate theory of mind and matter, how they connected.
And they took these notes and kind of buried them at the Harvard
Graduate School of Design library. That's basically the only
reason I wanted to go there. I really wanted to study with
Bruce Goff [one of the masters of "organic architecture"]
at the University of Oklahoma, but I said if I can find those
notes I'd have a leg up on the future. I found shards of them,
and people say that if they're not just dust, which could
be by now, that they must be in Brockton, Massachusetss in
a permanent archive someplace. It would take some doing to
unravel what he was going to write. But my father said he
did have the mathematics of mind physics, or the physics of
consciousness.
RG:
So when you grew up in this environment with your dad, you
must have thought all this was normal.
PL:
Yeah, that's the point.
RG:
Was there a certain point when you realized it wasn't normal?
PL:
I'd say it was the day at school when they asked me to talk
about gravity.
RG:
[Laughs] Oh, I see.
PL:
And I said, "I don't have to do it because it doesn't exist."
RG:
During your lecture you mentioned Buckminster Fuller [U.S.
inventor, mathematician, philosopher, author of Critical
Path and other books, perhaps most famous for inventing
the geodesic dome].
PL:
Yes.
RG:
How did you meet Fuller?
PL:
At one time in the mid-'70s I became the president of the
Boston-Cambridge chapter of the World Future Society. Because
I'd been in my studio by myself since 1968 on up. And the
thing is that my social life consisted of being involved in
organizations like that. I would get people to come and speak,
and speak myself and that kind of stuff. So Fuller was down
in Pennsylvania, then he'd come up and go to his island in
Maine. He wanted to remain a New Englander. He taught from
'48 to '49 and '50 at Black Mountain College. That's where
he met Kenneth Snelson. Fuller kind of stayed a Yankee right
in the New England area. So it was pretty easy to get him
to come on over, and we would have lectures at the Harvard
Science Center. He always liked to say that he got kicked
out of Harvard three times. Mostly you only got kicked out
once, but he kept coming back. What it was, he never got past
his freshman year, because the guy was an insane womanizer
and he did parties every night, never studied anything, never
took a note, didn't care about anything and just had a blast.
So they said, "We gotta let you go. You get zeros all the
time." Today it wouldn't even matter, because they don't care
if you can read. So he was quite willing to talk. He'd talk
at the drop of a hat.
I
learned to talk in front of people by listening to the way
he did things. Because he would give lessons in how to lecture.
He would say, "Never take a note, just stand up and start
babbling. And then eventually you're going to be able to make
some coherent statements, and so it's like you're vamping.
And then people will gradually start to listen to you when
this spot of logic shows up in this torrent of verbiage. Just
keep on talking." And he could do four, five hours straight
where some people would leave, eat, get a snooze and come
back and he's still going. He was like a fireplug. I started
modeling myself on him, like with the hair. I reached an age
where I sort of, kind of, looked like him a little bit, you
know? I thought it was great.
We
would go on retreats to Florence. The people in the planning
team got to be good friends and so we did things like, we'd
all go over to the Fort Belvedere in Florence and take that
thing over. Because it's up for grabs, you can rent it. And
then have New Age meetings and all that kind of stuff. Fuller
loved to go there. Because it was like transporting a lot
of the people in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Florence. So
we're just talking to ourselves again, but in another venue.
I
would have private conversations with him. I once had an argument,
for four hours, about the existence of the Mobius strip. Because
he believed in the Klein Bottle, you see. And I said, "How
in hell can you claim to believe in the Klein Bottle and think
that the Mobius strip is dubious?" He said, "Well, it's a
torus." I don't know what he had in his mind as a mathematical
background, because I don't think he got topology. Because,
in other words, the Mobius strip didn't have angles in it.
The tetrahedron was his big thing. He'd talk about it in the
same way Plato talked about angles. And I said, "Well, why
do you believe in the Klein Bottle?" He said, "Because I can
imagine it." I said, "You don't have to imagine a Mobius strip.
It's right there in front of you!" But he couldn't see how
that could involve a cross cap, meaning something that couldn't
be reduced to a two-dimensional surface. Which it does. It's
because he was thinking that the matrix was the thing that
a fly could walk over the edge of, like a torus. It's not.
The Mobius strip is only an analog for the reality of what
it is. And then he says, "Like a shadow... shadows don't exist,
they're the absence of light." He was quite a Newtonian in
certain ways. But he was an excellent inventor and kept people
on their toes.
RG:
You know, supposedly he once told Marshall McLuhan that during
questions and answers, he would wear earplugs in his ears
so he wouldn't hear the questions.
PL:
[Laughs] I think that's true, because he would pretend to
be deaf at the right times.
RG:
Earlier I brought up those weird metaphysical charts I always
see in Theosophical and Masonic books....
PL:
Yeah. Yeah.
RG:
Did they inspire you to adopt your style?
PL:
I think it wasn't that I was inspired so much. I was corroborated
by them.
RG:
I see.
PL:
In other words, as an approach to spiritual realms. I always
had a sense of liking diagrams, from the time I was studying
architecture. Architecture is built diagrams, basically. And
so it meant that you had something that could move from the
ideal into the real. Any sort of working drawings are simply
diagrams. Architecture encourages your imagination to work
that way.
I
actually challenged The Theosophical Society on their concept
of planes of reality. I said, "What you're doing is, you're
stacking two-dimensional surfaces in three-space. And you
are not going into any other dimensions at all." And they
were furious, because they thought I was attacking Madame
Blavatsky. They're ideologues in terms of the way they present
the material. That's one of the reasons why, when they teach
their courses, you only get a smidgen of stuff and you have
to keep coming back every week. They won't do an overview.
Because they're trying to bypass your conscious critical faculties
by leaking the information slowly.
RG:
At what point did you adopt that style? Did your style just
come full blown or was it a small, gradual progression?
PL:
I've kind of always done diagrams. It helped me think. I hear
some guy teaches a course in diagrammatic thinking now; he's
written books on it and stuff like that, and so it was kind
of natural for me. Because it was a way in which words naturally
fitted into something that's visual. I was always interested
in doing that.
RG:
Were you ever interested in comic books?
PL:
Oh yeah. How that came about was… from the fact that
I went to a progressive school. I went to the Mary Lee Burbank
School in Belmont. And it was a place where you, like, learned
to go to the store? And I was saying, Oh God, I want to learn
something else. I wanted to learn to read and write better
and do mathematics better. They were very much into Abstract
Expressionism and that artsy stuff. And where most kids did
what I call meaningless blobs, I could render perfectly. I
could do Superman, the Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, this kind
of stuff. And kids would give me their lunch money to have
these things.
I
would be constantly brought up on the carpet by these teachers
who were brought up with Abstract Expressionism, saying, "You're
too uptight, you're not expressing yourself, why don't you
feel freer?" I said, "Well, I don't like that stuff. It means
nothing to me." I could draw, and I knew these people couldn't.
You know, people who can draw get upset when people who can't
start telling them what to do!
So
eventually, to get through school, I would make good meaningless
blobs if I had to. And so they thought I was falling in with
them and stuff like that. But on the playground, kids would
come up to me and say, "I need three Supermans and a Captain
Midnight by four o'clock because I'm going to sell them to
somebody else." So I'd take all their lunch money and whip
these things out, and they'd have to stick them in their underwear
to get the pictures home, because if the teacher ever found
out about that. Well, they eventually did and they said to
me, "You're out of here!"
At
that point I was sent to the regular public schools until
I had to go to Belmont Hill. Because I wasn't doing anything.
The public school was nothing, just a total waste of time.
So anyway, I was always doing paintings. I actually started
painting with oil paints when I was four years old. Not crayons,
not pencils and that kid of stuff. I'd paint birds. Anything
that moved, stuff like that. So to answer your question, I
did do, well before Pop Art, all the cartoon characters as
paintings.
RG:
Is that because you were asked to do it, or because you wanted
to?
PL:
I think it was because the kids asked me to do it, and reading
comic books, I could imitate the styles quite easily.
RG:
Your paintings do look like full comic book pages sometimes,
with panels stacked on top of each other.
PL:
Sure, yeah.
RG:
In your lecture you mentioned Orfeo Angelucci [author of The
Secret of the Saucers, Amherst Press, 1955], which is
strange because he's a very obscure figure, even among UFO
people.
PL:
Yes, I know. I first heard of him from Giuseppe Conti who
gave me some books by him. When I was in New York working
for Kiesler [Frederick Kiesler was a pioneer of "organic architecture,"
whose most famous building is arguably the "Shrine of the
Book" in Jerusalem], at night I listened to Jean Shephard
who lasted from 1957 until 1976 and then went off the air.
But also I was listening to Long John Nebel. Now, Long John
was what Art Bell and George Noory do now.
RG:
Sure.
PL:
But Art Bell didn't do it till like 1985. Long John I think
went off the air in about '79 or something, so there was a
hiatus. That's why I think Art Bell thought there was a spot
to be filled. He was doing exactly the same thing. And it
was on Long John's show that I heard Orfeo Angelucci being
interviewed. In other words, the whole thing about the green
globes on the top of a car bumper and the voice coming out,
you know, and then this beautiful lady…. So he went through
the whole number, what you read in his book, that kind of
stuff. A whole raft of things.
You
know, Long John would sometimes hold his interviews in the
Carnegie Delicatessen, which is the most famous delicatessen
in New York up by Carnegie. Let's see, 57th Street, you're
down to like 50th Street and 7th Avenue… You'd go in
there and everybody would be eating a heart attack on a plate,
pastrami, malts, that kind of stuff. But it literally was
the place where Woody Allen would go. A classic place. Around
the corner is the Russian Tea Room, which is now out of business.
Which is awful. I remember going in there and seeing the ballerinas
trotting in there like they were prize horses, with their
hair, their sunglasses. Really amazing. They were all White
Russians. This is where Theremin [Leon Theremin, Soviet physicist
who invented the first electronic musical instrument in 1920]
met a lot of people, and where the KGB eventually picked him
up. People thought he was dead, but he was actually in a gulag.
RG:
I wanted to talk to you about Theremin. Before we do that,
though, I wanted to ask, was there something about Orfeo that
resonated with you more than any other contactee story?
PL:
Well, I mean… I thought George Adamski [author of Flying
Saucers Have Landed, British Book Centre, 1953] was actually
a fraud. Looking at him, I found him repulsive. In other words,
he didn't have the wide-eyed, innocent look that Orfeo Angelucci
did. I mean, I liked Orfeo's name! I mean, Orfeo! Orpheus.
And Angelucci, of course, from the angels.
RG:
Yes, Carl Jung was impressed by that.
PL:
I know it. He put him in his last book [Flying Saucers:
A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky, Harcourt, Brace
& World, 1959]. He said Orfeo had made up a new bible.
RG:
I was just reading your essay about The Day the Earth Stood
Still. You go into Theremin quite a bit. Is there something
about Theremin that particularly inspired or influenced you?
PL:
Well, I think it was because Tesla [Nikola Tesla, Croatian-born
electrical engineer who invented the first AC induction motor
in 1888] and Theremin were part of what made up the movie,
The Day the Earth Stood Still. Klaatu was actually
a European among the Americans. In the story the landlady
says, "You're from far away from here." He says, "How did
you know?" And she says, "I can always tell a New England
accent." And in the story, the boarding house is on Harvard
Street, all this kind of stuff. And so the person who wrote
the story said that Klaatu came from Europa, the fourth moon
of Jupiter, which is now being investigated for life. There's
water and ice on it and that kind of stuff.
RG:
You mean in the original short story? ["Farewell to the Master"
by Harry Bates.]
PL:
Yeah. You have to read the story to get a lot of the stuff
that is implied, but doesn't show up, in the movie. You know,
they made a lot of technical errors. Like Klaatu was in 309
at Walter Reed, and then he says he's in 306. They just let
that slip through in the movie, and I'm saying, what's going
on? And there are other funny things like that. But I always
thought of Klaatu, like, he was 78 years old and he looked
35 and he said the life expectancy was 130 on his home planet.
Both Tesla and Theremin were preternaturally young. I mean,
for a long time Tesla was a young man well into his 70s. And
so was Theremin, even though, at the end, he looked pretty
old. But he was still doing things that young guys do, beyond
the time you'd normally think people should be doing that
stuff. They were European gentlemen, very well-mannered, all
of the stuff you associate with living in Europe. So I began
to analyze the movie and said it was really made out of these
two characters who were brought together. That made it fascinating
to me. And especially the language they made up, that Klaatu
speaks. Because it has a Latin word order. It's like medieval
Latin, but it had some Navajo phonemes in it and that kind
of stuff.
RG:
Klaatu barada nikto.
PL:
Yeah, right. At one time I could reel off things that he says
in front of the interrossitor, the device on the ship. And
then, of course, he uses the Theremin thing. He doesn't touch
anything. He just has his hands come near it, which is the
way you play the Theremin. With one hand you raise the pitch
and with the other hand you change the volume. You didn't
actually touch the thing. So he's doing that, opening the
doors, running the whole ship that way. And then in the scene
where Klaatu gets brought back to life, Gort brings him into
the flying saucer. He lays him down in this thing, and there
are like zap rays coming from the feet to the head. Well,
Theremin actually tried to make somebody come back to life.
He had a lot of friends and one of them died. He was very
lonely after she died, and so he started to concoct this gadget
that would bring people back to life. And that gadget was
the model for the revival of Klaatu in the movie.
RG:
Did Robert Wise or the screenwriter actually say that the
movie was based on either Tesla or Theremin?
PL:
Well, they're dead now. But I think anybody who would be able
to come up with that kind of a movie has got to have a breadth
of knowledge that's pretty wide. He's casting his net over
a big water, and so you wouldn't even dare attempt something
like that, that would have that impact, unless you had a lot
of knowledge. I saw it the first day it came to the RKO Keith
Memorial Theatre on Tremont Street when I was, like, eleven
years old. Because I'd had the experience with Giuseppe Conti,
I said, "My God, that's my movie!" I kept seeing it everywhere
I could. Then finally, when VHS and DVDs came out, I got that.
And I keep watching it all the time.
RG:
A few years ago I read Tesla: Man Out of Time by Margaret
Cheney.
PL:
Yeah. Good book.
RG:
Somewhere in the book Cheney says that when Tesla would write
out a blueprint or a diagram, it was as if he were tracing
an image that was already there.
PL:
Oh yeah. He'd do it through lucid dreaming. He would, in a
sense, dream up the engine, forget about it, come back, and
then discover where it was wearing. You know, where the parts
were wearing out. Now, that's inner visualization and a half!
And that was the secret of why he did so many inventions.
RG:
Wait a minute. You're saying that he would dream of the engine,
one he hadn't built yet, and then he'd…?
PL:
Set it in motion, come back, see where the machine had worn
out over time. All in his head. Yeah.
RG:
And do you think it was entirely intuitive on his part, or
did he know exactly what he was doing?
PL:
I think he was always like that. And so it was inevitable
that he would be an inventor. Because it was so easy for him
to think fourth-dimensionally, dynamically. It wasn't just
a static thing with him. In other words, it isn't the way
an architect thinks, which is essentially static. You know,
in terms of space. He was thinking of parts actually moving,
like exchanging positions in space through time. This would
go over here, then that would go over there, and then something
else would happen.
RG:
Do you think he was a contactee, like Orfeo?
PL:
A lot of people claim that. He said he had no interest in
the spiritual. He didn't believe in telepathy, didn't believe
in any of that stuff, didn't believe in any religion, and
he just thought all these people were being superstitious
and wanted them to go away. And in that way he was very close
to H.P. Lovecraft, who was almost a believing atheist. In
other words, he was areligious, asexual, neurasthenic, he
just didn't want to react to the world. Like Virginia Woolf,
who considered religion the ultimate obscenity.
RG:
I was reading S.T. Joshi's biography of Lovecraft. He said
that the original story "Nyarlathotep" might have been based
on Tesla. Because, of course, Nyarlathotep first appears in
the story as this kind of odd person who's doing weird experiments
with electricity on the stage. They were contemporaries, weren't
they?
PL:
Oh yeah, sure. Because Tesla lived to almost 1943, whereas
Lovecraft died in 1937.
RG:
It's fascinating when you consider that if Lovecraft had lived
a normal life span, he would've been alive well into the 1960s.
PL:
That's true.
RG:
Which is amazing, when you think about what he might have
been writing during the Vietnam War say.
PL:
Right. Well, he might have been doing something else. I think
he wrote himself out.
RG:
Yeah?
PL:
You know what I mean? In other words, he had already said
what he had to say.
RG:
Colin Wilson was talking about his last major story, "Shadow
Out of Time," in this essay I just read, and he said that
H.P. Lovecraft was still thinking of himself as writing supernatural
horror stories even though he had obviously gone way beyond
that. But Lovecraft had not reconciled that paradox yet. So
Wilson thought his cancer was unconsciously brought on by
his frustration of not knowing where to go next. When did
you become aware of Lovecraft?
PL:
When I was at Brown. In other words, I'd heard about him,
but I didn't pay that much attention till I happened to go
to a meeting about it. And then I got just totally turned
on.
RG:
And did you start reading him at that time?
PL:
Oh yeah. I started with "Pickman's Model," because it was
about Boston. I mean, what I loved about him at first is his
sense of scholarship of an area, setting an environment, enlivening
it. I think that's one of the secrets of writing. In other
words, you've got a journey as the plot, but it has to be
in a lively environment, being able to create the mood. If
you read "Pickman," in other words, they're winding their
way through the Boston Streets and Lovecraft researched what
was there. As a matter of fact, in 1927, when he came back,
he was so disappointed, 'cause they had started to destroy
a lot of those old houses from the 1700s that were in the
North End. Of course, that was the place where Bostonians
first landed and set up shop, because they could watch the
Charles River and the Boston Harbor simultaneously, and then
they dug all those tunnels so that the people could go underground
from one house to another and watch who was approaching, in
the dark, without being observed. Which, of course, was used
later for the underground railroad, moving slaves up to Canada.
RG:
When I was reading that Tesla book I was surprised to see
that there's a man named George Viereck who has connections
with both Tesla and Lovecraft. He hired Lovecraft to ghost-write
for him, and he was also a fan of Tesla and was hanging around
his lab all the time.
PL:
Well, Lovecraft did work for Houdini too.
RG:
That's right. He wrote "Imprisoned With the Pharaohs" for
him. You know, if you read his story "Dreams in the Witch
House" you can tell he's writing about what theoretical physicists
now call hyperspace. Do you think he was just naturally attuned
to his unconscious, or did he have esoteric interests he didn't
like to talk about it?
PL:
Oh, I think he knew the whole gamut. He just didn't believe
any of it! He probably liked to use the esoteric stuff because
he knew it would tick people off and freak them out.
RG:
The painting you're working on now is about Lovecraft?
PL:
It's called "Pickman's Mephitic Models," based on the story.
Certain things about it many people don't realize. Pickman
was a real painter who lived between 1888 and 1926. Now, there's
a question mark [gesturing toward the writing in the margins
of the painting], because Lovecraft claims that he turned
into a ghoul. God knows how old he is now.
RG:
Well, we know he reappears in The Dream Quest of Unknown
Kadath as a ghoul. So, let me get this straight, you're
saying Pickman really lived in Boston?
PL:
Yeah. That's what I'm saying. In other words, the reason why
I found out about that is that I went to Brown University.
I belong to the Lovecraft Society, which meets at the University.
They do things like follow in Lovecraft's footsteps, just
like he followed in Edgar Allan Poe's footsteps. I mean the
actual footfalls, you know, like they're going out looking
for sasquatch, this kind of stuff. I mean, these are really
dedicated people when it comes to Lovecraft. But in the top
floor of the John Hay Library, you have all of Lovecraft's
archives. And messing around in there, I noticed, I said,
what are these paintings? And the librarian told me, "Well,
those are Pickman's paintings." I said, "I thought this was
like something he made up, like The Necronomicon, that
kind of stuff." And he said no, that the guy actually existed.
He was a mediocre painter, living in Boston at that time,
painting for the Boston Art Club, and places like that. We're
not talking avant garde galleries here. But Boston is not
an avant garde place. It stays literally 15 to 20 years behind
New York at all times. I mean, even New York isn't in any
great shape anymore in relation to the rest of the world.
But at a certain point Pickman got this studio in the north
end of Boston, which at that time was the first area where
people lived when they first came to Boston. And the reason
they did that, they were defending their position, and in
order to really defend it, by 1700 they had dug underground
tunnels all through that area so people could go up in a house
and then not be seen by the enemy attacking them.
RG:
I remember that from the story.
PL:
The tunnels were used first in the Revolutionary War. The
next time they were used is during the time of moving slaves
from the south on big ships, and when they would land they'd
instantly go down into those tunnels, until the slave ships
that were trying to catch them, coming up from Chesapeake
Bay or West Virginia, got tired and went away. And the story
is... You've read the whole story?
RG:
Sure.
PL:
Eliot, the narrator, goes down into these tunnels with Thurber…
RG:
Wait. Thurber's the narrator, who's talking to Eliot.
PL:
Right, you're right. So Eliot brings him down and Thurber
starts hearing rustlings and stuff down there. He's looking
at these God-awful paintings, very realistic renderings of
demons, as they're going deeper and deeper into the inner
sanctum. And then suddenly Eliot disappears and Thurber grabs
something that he thinks is a background shot of a photograph.
When he gets home he realizes that this was actually the demon
that Pickman had taken a snapshot of, and that he was using
it to help him paint the thing from real life. And so I've
always wanted to do a painting on this, but this has nothing
to do with the fact that it's going to be in the Satan show.
It's just that it's been on my mind for years, and this is
a perfect time to do it.
Okay.
Now, the thing is, once I discover that these paintings are
actually in the John Hay Library, I ask them, "Can I come
back and take pictures of them?" The guy says, "Absolutely
not. This is like a museum. The only thing you can do is,
you or a sketch artist can sketch these things, otherwise
it'd be like going into a museum and borrowing stuff. You
can't do that. The things would be ruined, taking them out
of the case and all that kind of stuff." So I said okay. I
got a friend of mine and said, "Let's go down and do some
visualization of that stuff. That's how I got the things that're
there [referring to a series of four sketches hanging on the
wall of his upstairs studio]. Arnie Clapman, that's my friend's
name, I hope he's going to come to the show, he decided to
do the first sketch. So I'd say stuff like, "No, no, that's
wrong, look at this here." So we were working these things
out together to get a pretty good rendition of what they actually
look like. There's quite a number of paintings that Pickman
did. So I picked basically the four juiciest ones. They're
not really the way they're described in the story, because
Lovecraft's talking about something that almost sounded like
Andrew Wyeth or Norman Rockwell, you know, the dogs playing
poker and this kind of stuff. In other words, that isn't what
Pickman was all about. He was depicting the suffering of Satan,
you see, through these demons. Because the whole theory of
what Satan is, it's Lucifer, the highest of the seraphim,
the bearer of God's light, who at a certain point comes to
believe he is what is being revealed to him.
So,
I began to realize that Lucifer is this creature who, having
received an infinite revelation, believed he was God. So that's
the first sin of pride. It's also a moment at which the first
transsubstantiation occurs. And he becomes Satan, which is
like... This was a flash, an instant. He becomes a humanoid,
but he has an infinite number of physical senses, each of
which are as different as eyes are from your ears. If you
can imagine, we only have five or six senses, and we have
trouble even distinguishing those when people are in synaesthesia.
So he goes through all the seven deadly sins, right down the
list, finally to wrath. He's lusting after knowledge in this
way, and so he sees the universe as a non-supernatural example
of cosmic art. Now, we know this is what Lovecraft was into.
Because he kept talking about how he wasn't interested in
religion. In a heaven state there is no religion, meaning
that you're seeing the whole thing ... I mean, to worship
something means that it's something beyond you, right? In
other words, it's not being revealed to you.
So
here was the situation. For years Lovecraft was defined as
an atheist. Well, he wasn't saying anything about what he
really was at all. He wasn't even an agnostic. That's exactly
what the situation is, in other words, when you enter an eternal
realm. You've got to know there is no religion. So it's literally
a non-supernatural state of cosmic art. This is what this
creature experiences, who then becomes Satan, and the moment
he becomes Satan he's pulled back into eternity. He loses
instantly, loses all these senses. And as it's happening he's
going right down to wrath. And so what he's doing is, he's
putting on a show that he isn't suffering.
Look
at all the stuff the Existentialists did. You can start with
Picasso, you know, and then Francis Bacon and other guys like
that. What they were doing is depicting suffering. And that's
exactly what a demon is, he's pretending that he isn't. So
he can get more people down there. You know, misery loves
company, that's the whole thing. So that's basically the pitch
that I'm working on.
RG:
S.T. Joshi once said that Lovecraft was creating an anti-mythology,
in the sense that he was turning basic theological concepts
upside down and placing hell outside, in space...
PL:
Yes, in an extraterrestrial realm. The thing is, where you
gonna place it? From the time of Dante, when you have the
Ptolemaic universe, you had God on the outside like a hypersphere,
and then in the center you have the Earth, all the seven heavens
and layers, and then you have the Mount of Purgatory and Hell
right in the center, and here's Satan flapping his wings and
he keeps making the lake of Cocytus ice so you can't get out.
So, again, where Heaven and Hell are, who the hell knows that
now? Because we've got so many dimensions going. I don't think
one person could ever make a total theological statement about
that. That, I think, is impossible, because then... The whole
thing that Dante did was summed up in the medieval world.
It's like St. Thomas Aquinas, the Summa Theologica. He didn't
invent it, he just put it all in one package. You get twelve
fat books there sitting in any library. Whereas... I think
if Joshi thinks Lovecraft was doing anything like that, just
throwing together all this stuff to form a kind of anti-mythology,
that's where I would disagree with him.
RG:
Do you think Lovecraft was actually an atheist or...?
PL:
No no, no no no. I think he recognized what he was dealing
with, he was dealing with demons. And he was dealing with
creatures that're suffering. There's no way out of this suffering.
I think... You know, Mick Jagger's "Sympathy for the Devil."
I think it was inspired by that. You don't know who's reading
what, you know. It just comes out once in a while in the pop
culture. And so, I would say that it's probably impossible
for a lot of people to even think what Lovecraft's theological
state was. He could've been trying to do a Marx to Hegel,
that kind of thing, in other words, turn the thing upside
down and crawl around inside it. But, look, the guy was eating
poorly, he had like a quart of ice cream a day. He was suffering
constantly near the end. He wasn't concerned with his body
at all, not the way we're concerned with our bodies nowadays.
I
think that the phrase "a non-supernatural cosmic work of art"
is what he would say that the devil had seen, or Satan had
seen, in that instant. Like this orgasm of knowledge, where
he sees the universe in a way that we can never see. But then
that gets taken away. Of course, revelation is always taken
away. So then he is thrust into some kind of outer space realm,
like here [pointing toward the painting in progress]. In other
words, he's recognized he's gone through R'lyeh, the Sunken
City of R'lyeh, and then Cthulhu, the extraterrestrial, calls
his band of worshippers home to recognize him as the anti-christ.
This is all in The Necronomicon, something Lovecraft
actually did make up.
RG:
Well, you know, Colin Wilson claimed that Winfield Lovecraft,
Lovecraft's father, was a Freemason, part of the Boston Freemasons,
and speculated that The Necronomicon might have been
real, something Winfield saw in the local Masonic Lodge and
perhaps brought home with him one night. Young Lovecraft tiptoes
downstairs and flips through a couple of pages late one night….
PL:
Yeah, okay. I like Colin Wilson, mainly because he never went
to school. When you don't go to school you can say anything
you want like that and not have to worry. [Laughs] And I would
bet that some of the things he's saying are correct. But how
much, who knows?
References
Laffoley,
Paul. "Disco Volante." The UFO Show. Ed. Barry Blinderman.
Normal: University Galleries, 2000. 24-37.
Paul
Laffoley was born on August 14, 1940. In 1962 he graduated
from Brown University with honors in Classics, Philosophy
and Art History. In 1963-64 he lived in New York where he
worked with visionary architect Frederick J. Kiesler. At this
time he was also hired to work on the design team for the
twin towers of the World Trade Center. But he was fired at
the behest of the chief architect, Mihoru Yamasaki, after
having the audacity to suggest that bridges or walkways be
placed between the towers to reinforce what he felt was a
fragile structure. In 1964 Laffoley returned to Boston where
he settled down in a small studio space now dubbed the Boston
Visionary Cell. While living in this studio Laffoley has produced
the vast majority of his paintings. His most celebrated work
can be found in two books: Paul Laffoley: The Phenomenology
of Revelation (Kent Fine Art, 1989) and Architectonic
Thought Forms: a Survey of the Art of Paul Laffoley 1967-1999
(Austin Museum of Art, 1999). If you have any inquiries regarding
Laffoley's work, please visit www.kentgallery.com.
Robert
Guffey is a graduate of the Master of Fine Arts Program at
California State University at Long Beach. His short stories,
articles and interviews appear in such magazines and anthologies
as After Shocks, Modern Magic, New Dawn,
Paranoia, The Pedestal, Riprap, Steamshovel
Press, The Third Alternative, and the 2004 compendium
The New Conspiracy Reader. He is currently teaching
English at CSU Long Beach. He can be contacted at rguffey@hotmail.com.
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