The twelve tales that
make up Strange Forces fall into two loose camps. The first essays a
wild, poeticized invocation of mythological or biblical scenes. Lugones seems
to be drawn particularly by the punitive and catastrophic. One story weaves a
modern tale of Sodom and Gomorrah involving destruction by fire from the sky. Another,
delving into the kind of religious fanaticism one finds in Flaubert’s The
Temptation of St. Anthony (which surely must have been an influence), turns
the screws on a lonely, eremitic monk’s faith and sends him into the charred
desert ruins to pursue a legend that Lot’s wife still lives within her pillar
of salt. There’s a story of martyrdom during the Crusades in which the severed
hand of a saint acquires a life of its own. One of these pieces, “Origins of
the Flood: Spirit Narrative” appears at first to be a free-form narrative
experiment describing the primordial origins of life using a weird mélange of
elements of hard science with lavish imagination:
The
entire globe glistened like a monstrous silver ball. The atmosphere was of
phosphorous with vestiges of chlorine and fluorine. Flames of sodium, of
silica, of magnesium shot forth, the luminous progeny of metals. The atmosphere
glittered like a star, outspread across a span of many millions of miles. On
the continents and in their contiguous seas, organized life already flourished,
if in guises inconceivable today; calcium phosphate didn’t exist, and these
beings had no bones.
But the extravagances of
the piece are reigned in at the end by a return to realist narrative and short
story format; we realize we’ve been listening to a medium attempting to summon
forth the earliest human beings. In a typical Lugones ending, a charge of
charlatanism by one of the séance’s participants produces an eruption from the
occult that combines horror and humor in the face of the “strange forces”
before which we humans can merely scratch in the dark.
“Origins of the Flood” bridges
the mythological/Biblical stories in Strange Forces with the second
category of these tales, which consist of portraits of scientific experiments
into which Lugones settles, like a malignant, impish spirit, in the murky niche
between scientific risk-taking and madness. These Frankensteinian tales – which
inject a heavy dose of science into their fictions – depict science pushed to
the point of pathology. Lugones’ formidable erudition ranges into details of
medicine, biology, chemistry, physics, astronomy, geology, engineering – a
remarkable cornucopia of scientific interests replete with references to
scientists, theories, and granular details of basic science richly seasoned
with those of an invented nature.
In one story a composer
seeks the meta-musical spectroscopic signature of the solar system by inventing
a complex device to generate both an audio and visual “music of the spheres,”
resulting in quite an epiphany when his meta-music elicits the light of the
sun. In another, a scientist
perfects an “etheric wave” capable of exploding matter, a rather dangerous
undertaking in a small lab. In “Psychon,” a physicist attempts the distillation
of thought into liquid:
Calculate,
if you can, the enormous radiation which must be produced by the daily
expenditure of thought. What happens to all the useless or strange thoughts,
the creations of the imagination, the ecstasies of the mystics, the dreams of
hysterics, the projections of illogical minds, what becomes of all those forces
whose action is not manifest for lack of immediate application? ...thought is
immaterial; but its manifestations must be fluid…
A whiff of the uncorked
liquid sends the narrator and physicist – and a poor Siamese cat – sailing into
the air, where “for more than an hour, we committed the most extravagant
escapades, to the complete stupefaction of the neighbors whom the tumult
attracted.”
All of these stories are
narrated by a skeptical observer and communicated with an outlandish flirtation
with believability; repeatedly I paused to reread some of Lugones’ riotous
paragraphs, which often test the limits of credulity. His stories almost
invariably culminate in what appears to be a trademark Lugones ending; a morbid “punch-line” in which the mad side of science or the inexplicability of nature dominates,
with grievous consequences imbued with a cartoonish black humor of the sort
Charles Addams might employ.
There’s a bemused sort
of cynicism in these stories, aimed not simply at playing with the explosive
possibilities at the frontiers of faith and science, but coming across as a
slightly reactionary dismissiveness and mockery of the manias and excesses of a
too passionate enthusiasm. There’s even a degree of gleeful misanthropy in
them, well articulated by the narrator of “The Firestorm,” who, while having a
slave read him travel narratives, eats alone, because “if I disliked women, as
I have told you, you can imagine how I abhorred men.” The degree to which
Lugones revels in a mischievous skepticism became acutely apparent to me when I
happened to follow up Strange Forces with Novalis’ ardently poetic
meditation on nature, The Novices of Sais, filled with yearning, lyrical
passages urging the “plucking of strings in search of chords and melodies” that
will reveal nature’s secrets and implying a kind of synaesthesia involved in detecting
the underlying unity of natural phenomena. Juxtaposed against Novalis’s
romanticism, Lugones comes across as a devious, somewhat juvenile sprite, laughing as
he tosses a wrench into the celestial clockwork. In other words, Strange
Forces is the kind of book that could well become a favorite - at least for the kind
of kid who enjoys blowing things up.
