02 “Selenium Ghosts of the Eighteen Seventies” (1978)
Updated: 3 days ago
Today, I want to think about the metaphysics of time in "Selenium Ghosts."
The story plays with television, fiction, and hoaxing. There’s the relationship between Clarinda (Claire de lune/moonshine) and her lover Apollo, or is he just another of her performances: an actor pretending to be another actor pretending to be a character?
Bentley’s recurring male cast also carries psychological significance, and The Wonderful World of Aurelian Bentley functions as an inner melodrama. The story draws on the history of murder as a fine art, reaching back to Thomas De Quincey, while also making satirical references to Bentley’s slyly hidden pro-Southern politics—his support for the Russians in the Crimean War (a position far more prevalent in the American South than the North), his disdain for the Union, and his exoticization of Hawaiians as racialized plantation figures.
The story also develops Lafferty’s demiurgic themes from the 1960s, questioning the nature of artistic creation, reality, and perception. It plays with how fiction shapes experience and how experience shapes fiction.
All of these themes fall within Lafferty’s major concern: the nature of time. I’ll distinguish two modes of existence using the following notation:
Ω (Absolute, Timeless Existence): A state of absolute, unchanging existence beyond time. It is without succession, beginning, or end. Ω represents transcendent reality, entirely outside of temporal flow, associated with divinity or the absolute.
μ (Enduring but Non-Successional Time): A state of duration that, while beyond temporal succession, is not wholly outside of time. μ signifies a stable, unchanging existence. It can be attributed to incorruptible created beings, such as angels, the souls of the blessed in Heaven, and the resurrected saints in their glorified state. In some philosophical traditions, celestial bodies have also been considered to partake in μ. After the Final Judgment, the damned receive incorruptible bodies and exist eternally in punishment. While their state is fixed and unchanging, their suffering sets them apart from the blessed, raising theological questions about whether they fully participate in μ. Lafferty explores this distinction elsewhere, but it lies beyond this story’s scope. Unlike Ω, which is entirely outside time, μ partakes of time’s presence but without change, decay, or sequence.
The narrator tells us:
Although Muybridge was in fact working on the zoopraxiscope [ . . .] Bentley did not use 'moving pictures.' Each of Bentley’s thirty-minute live dramas was recorded in one single matrix or frame: and, thereafter, that picture took on a life and growth of its own.
We, as viewers, watch the dramas in ordinary sequential time. Bentley’s single matrix mimics Ω, while the persistence of its characters suggests an analogy with μ. These are analogies: the matrix receives new impressions, and its characters act, so neither is simply outside succession.
The narrator presents the dramas in sequence, each bleeding into the next and coming into greater focus. Although we read Selenium Ghosts in sequence, its moments can be imagined as held together and understood from Ω.
How would such a thing work, the experience of Ω?
The answer:
There was, however, an oddity in all the playbacks. The film-fix of the receiver continued to receive impressions so that every time a 'slow light' drama is presented it is different, because of the feedback. The resolution of the pictures improves with use and is now much clearer . . .
The differences accumulate rather than conflict, bringing greater clarity with each iteration. The image of all the moments held together gives an intimation of Ω.
This is foreshadowed by the narrator telling us:
This final scene of The Perils will be met often later. Due to the character of the 'slow light' or selenium scenes, this vivid scene leaks out of its own framework and is superimposed, sometimes faintly, sometimes powerfully, as a ghost scene on all twelve of the subsequent dramas.
The flaming wagon is an example of Lafferty’s iconographic insetting, where an image becomes both a plot point and a thematic keynote. Events from one moment recur in subsequent replays, giving successive events a persistence that ordinary playback cannot explain. It is not that "the memory is stuck"—the hay wagon is still happening.
In the selenium dramas, earlier moments don’t simply pass away; they become layered over later experiences. Their persistence suggests μ, while their continuing interactions still involve succession. This comic invention explores the relation between time and timelessness through a created work’s imitation of the all-at-once character of Ω.
Because no one ceases to exist from the viewpoint of Ω or μ (whether because of the divine Creator (Ω) or the created soul (μ)), Bentley never really goes away but becomes ghostly:
He was also dead by that time... and yet he appears as a major character in [the thirteenth drama].
Bentley plays at demiurgy. He builds his 'one single matrix' to mimic Ω. But he is a creature. He cannot cross the threshold. Instead, he is devoured. As a creature himself, he can never leap past μ to Ω and become its God. Thus, it consumes him, folding him into its enduring created world. The matrix imitates Ω without becoming it, and Bentley’s loss of control makes that distinction decisive. He cannot simply switch off what he has made. As Clarinda says:
"That sort of shuts it all off when the wire is cut, doesn’t it?" [ . . . ] "No, no," Clarinda said. "I have other circuits. The hay wagon still can come . . .
Current Notes:
