“Selenium Ghosts of the Eighteen Seventies” (1978) II + Notes
- Jon Nelson
- Mar 14
- 4 min read
Today, I want to think about the metaphysics of time in "Selenium Ghosts." Before turning to that issue, let’s take stock of some of what else is at play in the story.
There’s the interplay of 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?
There’s also the psychological significance of Bentley’s recurring male cast and the way The Wonderful World of Aurelian Bentley is 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 north), his disdain for the Union, and his exoticization of Hawaiians as radicalized plantation figures.
Beyond these historical and narrative layers, the story advances Lafferty’s demiurgic themes from the 1960s, pushing against the nature of artistic creation, reality, and perception. It also plays with how fiction shapes experience, and how experience, in turn, shapes fiction. And these are just a few of the themes in "Selenium Ghosts of the Eighteen Seventies."
But all of them take place within Lafferty’s major theme: the nature of time itself. How does the story conceptualize time? To explore this, I’ll introduce a distinction between two modes of existence using the following notation:
Ω (Absolute, Timeless Existence): A state of absolute, unchanging existence beyond time—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—often 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. However, this distinction lies beyond the story’s scope and is included here for clarity and because Lafferty explores it elsewhere in his work. Unlike Ω, which is entirely outside time, μ partakes of time’s presence but without change, decay, or sequence.
At the core of the story’s dissection of time is this distinction. 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."
This means that while we, as viewers, watch Ω—the single, unchanging moment—from the perspective of μ (the sequential flow of time), the characters experience Ω as μ. Because one cannot tell a story from the perspective of Ω, the narrator lays out the narratives as a sequence of dramas, with each succeeding drama bleeding into the subsequent one. However, each one comes into greater focus, all moments collapsing into Ω. If this process continued indefinitely, the viewpoints of Ω and μ would coincide in Ω. In other words, although we as readers have to experience Selenium Ghosts as analogous to an experience of μ, its full comprehension would have to be from Ω.
How would such a thing work, the experience of Ω?
The answer is in the following:
"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..."
What matters here is that these differences are not conflicting but cumulative. Each one builds on the last, bringing greater clarity with every iteration. Each change refines the media experience, drawing us toward a fuller understanding of what everything means from the perspective of temporal collapse into the single moment 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 what I call an example of Lafferty’s iconographic insetting, where an image becomes a plot and thematic keynote. This technique shows how events from one moment recur in subsequent replays, reinforcing Lafferty’s central idea that μ gradually dissolves into Ω. It is not that "the memory is stuck"—the hay wagon is still happening. In μ, moments don’t pass away; they become layered over all future experiences. While comedic and imaginative, this also serves as the narrative’s key touchpoint for the space between time and timelessness—the process of Ω gradually subsuming μ.
Because no one truly ceases to exist from the viewpoint of Ω or μ—whether because of divine creator (Ω) or 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, he becomes consumed by it, folded into its μ. Once the single matrix exists, it cannot be turned off any more than can the eternal, self-perpetuating nature of Ω, which exists beyond duration. 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:
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