Charles Fort was a crank in the best sense of the word. Lovecraft and the X-files can't begin to compete with the spooky stuff he uncovered. In the early twentieth century he put together great quantities of exhaustively documented 'puzzling evidence' (in the words of David Byrne), data which science is unable or unwilling to explain. Forts' books gave me nightmares when I read them when I was seven. Strange items drop from the sky, bizarre artifacts turn up in unexpected places, stars violate the laws of astronomy, giant clouds blot out the moon and the sun trembles in the sky. Is the world inside out? Is it flat? Or maybe shaped like a giant spindle?
What does it all mean? He drops cryptic, breathless hints such as "I think we're property." and "I think that we're fished for. It may be that we're highly esteemed by super-epicures somewhere." Whatever you think about this information, you will at some point while reading Forts' books feel like the foundations of your reality are slipping slightly to the south...
Consider yourself warned!
EXCERPT
A PROCESSION of the damned.
By the damned, I mean the excluded.
We shall have a procession of data that Science has excluded.
Battalions of the accursed, captained by pallid data that I have exhumed, will march. You'll read them -- or they'll march. Some of them livid and some of them fiery and some of them rotten.
Some of them are corpses, skeletons, mummies, twitching, tottering, animated by companions that have been damned alive. There are giants that will walk by, though sound asleep. There are things that are theorems and things that are rags: they'll go by like Euclid arm in arm with the spirit of anarchy. Here and there will flit little harlots.
Many are clowns. But many are of the highest respectability. Some are assassins. There are pale stenches and gaunt superstitions and mere shadows and lively malices: whims and amiabilities. The naive and the pedantic and the bizarre and the grotesque and the sincere and the insincere, the profound and the puerile.
A stab and a laugh and the patiently folded hands of hopeless propriety.
The ultra-respectable, but the condemned, anyway.
The aggregate appearance is of dignity and dissoluteness: the aggregate voice is a defiant prayer: but the spirit of the whole is processional.
The power that has said to all these things that they are damned, is Dogmatic Science.
But they'll march.
The little harlots will caper, and freaks will distract attention, and the clowns will break the rhythm of the whole with their buffooneries -- but the solidity of the procession as a whole: the impressiveness of things that pass and pass and pass, and keep on and keep on and keep on coming.
The irresistibleness of things that neither threaten nor jeer nor defy, but arrange themselves in mass-formations that pass and pass and keep on passing.
* * *
So, by the damned, I mean the excluded.
But by the excluded I mean that which will some day be the excluding.
Or everything that is, won't be.
And everything that isn't, will be -
But, of course, will be that which won't be -
It is our expression that the flux between that which isn't and that which won't be, or the state that is commonly and absurdly called "existence," is a rhythm of heavens and hells: that the damned won't stay damned; that salvation only precedes perdition. The inference is that some day our accursed tatterdemalions will be sleek angels. Then the sub-inference is that some later day, back they'll go whence they came.
* * *
It is our expression that nothing can attempt to be, except by attempting to exclude something else: that that which is commonly called "being" is a state that is wrought more or less definitely proportionately to the appearance of positive difference between that which is included and that which is excluded.
But it is our expression that there are no positive differences: that all things are like a mouse and a bug in the heart of a cheese. Mouse and a bug: no two things could seem more unlike. They're there a week, or they stay there a month: both are then only transmutations of cheese. I think we're all bugs and mice, and are only different expressions of an all-inclusive cheese.
Or that red is not positively different from yellow: is only another degree of whatever vibrancy yellow is a degree of: that red and yellow are continuous, or that they merge in orange.
So then that, if, upon the basis of yellowness and redness, Science should attempt to classify all phenomena, including all red things as veritable, and excluding all yellow things as false or illusory, the demarcation would have to be false and arbitrary, because things colored orange, constituting continuity, would belong on both sides of the attempted border-line.
About the Author: Charles Hoy Fort
Charles Fort (1874-1932) fancied
himself a true skeptic, one who
opposes all forms of dogmatism,
believes nothing, and does not take
a position on anything. He claimed
to be an "intermediatist," one who
believes nothing is real and nothing
is unreal, that "all phenomena are
approximations one way or the
other between realness and
unrealness." Actually, he was an
anti-dogmatist who collected weird
and bizarre stories.
Fort spent a good part of his
adult life in the New York City public
library examining newspapers,
magazines, and scientific journals.
He was looking for accounts of anything
weird or mysterious which
didn't fit with current scientific theories.
He collected accounts of frogs
and other strange objects raining
from the sky, UFOs, ghosts, spontaneous
human combustion, the stigmata,
psychic abilities, etc. He published
four collections of weird tales
and anomalies during his lifetime:
Book of the Damned (1919), New
Lands (1923), Lo! (1931), and Wild
Talents (1932). In these works, he
does not seem interested in questioning
the reliability of his sources,
which is odd, given that he had
worked as a news reporter for a
number of years before embarking
on his quest to collect stories of the
weird and bizarre. He does reject
one story about a talking dog who
disappeared into a puff of green
smoke. He expresses his doubt that
the dog really went up in green
smoke, though he doesn't question
its ability to speak.
Fort did not seem particularly
interested in making any sense out
of his collection of weird stories. He
seemed particularly uninterested in
scientific testing, yet some of his
devotees consider him to be the
founding father of modern paranormal
studies. His main interest in scientific
hypotheses was to criticize
and ridicule the very process of
theorizing. His real purpose seems
to have been to embarrass scientists
by collecting stories on "the borderland
between fact and fantasy"
which science could not explain or
explain away. Since he did not generally
concern himself with the reliability
or accuracy of his data, this
borderland also blurs the distinction
between open-mindedness and
gullibility.
Fort was skeptical about scientific
explanations because scientists
sometimes argue "according to their
own beliefs rather than the rules of
evidence" and they suppress or ignore
inconvenient data. He seems to
have understood that scientific theories
are models, not pictures, of reality,
but he considered them to be
little more than superstitions and
myths. He seems to have had a profound
misunderstanding of the nature
of scientific theories. For, he
criticized them for not being able to
accommodate anomalies and for
requiring data to fit. He took particular
delight when scientists made incorrect
predictions and he attacked
what he called the "priestcraft" of
science. Fort seems to have been
opposed to science as it really is:
fallible, human and tentative, after
probabilities rather than absolute
certainties. He seems to have
thought that since science is not infallible,
any theory is as good as any
other. This is the same kind of misunderstanding
of science that we
find with so-called "scientific creationists"
and many other pseudoscientists.
Apparently, Fort was a prolific
writer. He is said to have written ten
novels, but only one was published:
The Outcast Manufacturers (1906).
One of Fort's amusements as an
adult seems to have been to speculate
about such things as frogs falling
from the sky.
He postulated that
there is a Super-Sargasso Sea above
the Earth (which he called
Genesistrine) where living things
originate and periodically are
dumped on Earth by intelligent beings
who communicate with secret
societies down below, perhaps using
teleportation.
Fort had very few friends, but
one of them, Tiffany Thayer, created
the Fortean Society to promote and
encourage Fort-like attacks on science
and scientists.Ê When Fort died
in 1937, he left over 30 boxes of
notes, which the Fortean Society
began publishing in the Fortean Society
Magazine. In 1959 Thayer died
and the Fortean Society came to an
end. Others, however, took up the
torch. There are many Fortean
groups, but it is worth noting that
Fort opposed the idea of a Fortean
Society. He thought that such a
group would attract spiritualists and
crackpots.
... And sure enough...
Softcover, 8¼" x 10¾", 485+ pages
Perfect-Bound