Confusions.
Showers of frogs and blizzards of snails - gushes of periwinkles down from the sky -
The preposterus, the grotesque, the incredible - and why, if I am going to tell of hundreds of these, is the quite ordinary so regarded?
Charles Fort, Lo!
First, a few words from our sponsor, the late Gertrude Stein (pictured, right):
Who was Charles Fort? Was Charles (who was Charles Fort) Charles Fort? Charles Fort was! Fort was Charles - who was who? Was who who? Was Fort Charles? Was Charles Fort Fort? Charles was Fort, was Fort Charles? Was Charles Charles? Was Fort Fort? Was "was" was? Was "was was" was? Was "was was" was was was? Charles was Charles, Fort was Fort - was Charles Fort Charles? Fort was!
Charles Hoy Fort, (pictured, above left at the age of 19, sic) was born, if the records we have are to be trusted, in 1874 in Albany, New York. He died in the Bronx in 1932. He lived most of his life in New York City, but spent several years in London in the 1920s. Of Dutch descent, Fort spent 27 years researching and cross referencing reports of anomalous phenomena in magazines, periodicals, and scientific journals in the New York Public Library, and the British Museum Library.
What he discovered was that some scientists (like the priests of a new dogmatic religion) tend to put forth pseudo-explanations of anomalous phenomena rather than risk appearing fallible - or be forced to accept that their scientific model of 'reality' is perforce incomplete or partial. As traditional religious faiths declined, human beings (including scientists themselves) looked for new certainties; science and its apparent supremacy, authority and universality, provided them with the emotional and intellectual security they had lost.
But this is a mistaken use of, and a distortion of scientific philosophy. In this instance, science, rather than the rational pursuit of empirical data to either confirm or refute a testable hypothesis, has become an entrenched dogma reliant upon faith just as much as does the belief system of a confirmed Jehovah's Witness or a paranoid schizophrenic. Fort would, for example, have found Richard Dawkins' trenchant atheism hilarious (in order to be a scientific atheist, one would require proof that God does not exist; since no such proof exists, Dawkins' atheism relies on faith - a faith just as factually unsupported and laughable as the faith of the dogmatic Christians of whom he is so critical. There is simply no usable evidence on this subject, and in order to be true to scientific philosophy, one must remain agnostic about questions which science is unable to address simply because such questions cannot be scientifically tested).
Fort found that some scientists, like other categories of human being (or quasi-human entity) argue according to their beliefs and prejudices and not according to rules of evidence or logic. There is a strong element of 'old mammalian' (limbic system) primate territoriality in this (and perhaps even reptilian/midbrain/brainstem territoriality). The first Honorary Member of the Isle of Wight Fortean Society, Robert Anton Wilson has observed how many human primates fight just as viciously and irrationally over intellectual/philosophical/religiously territory as they do over physical (geographical) territory. In this way, like the Catholic Inquistion, some scientists (particularly those who have little or no training in philosophy or psychology) 'damn' (i.e. suppress, ignore, or attempt to discredit or 'explain away') material which is inconvenient to their beliefs, or which challenges their dogma (makes them feel anxious, threatened and insecure). Fort was critical of the reductionism of modern science (c.f. Dawkins's neo-Darwinism, and, for example, hyperbolic genetic theories of everything from alcoholism to in-growing toenails).
Charles Fort (right, as an older man) was not essentially anti-science, but he was critical of what is now often referred to as 'scientism', and what Laird of Camster, Dr Robert Anton Wilson, one of the most fortean of post-Fort writers, has dubbed "fundamentalist materialism."
The first of Fort's extant works on his philosophy and strange phenomena, The Book of the Damned (1919), is an astounding catalogue of anomalous reports and occurrences which scientists have most unconvincingly tried to explain away - or simply ignored because their model of reality (the current scientific paradigm) cannot accommodate such material. Fort pointed out that a science which cannot accommodate these marvellous and unexplained things cannot therefore arrogate to itself the completeness or universality that many practising scientists erroneously assume.
Most scientists were, for many years, sceptical of 'lay' reports of meteorites falling on Earth - in fact, they were more than sceptical: they said that it was impossible, and that anyone who made such a report was therefore either a fool, a liar, or mad. Science has since accepted what most other people knew with from their own experience or from the anecdotal evidence trustworthy friends. But for many years they were blind to the truth of meteorites because their model of the Universe flatly denied the possibility of the existence. Rather than accept the evidence and modify the theory, they clung for many years to a model of reality which was clearly faulty and in need of revision. They had made an idol of their model of reality - a belief system (or BS, for short).
Perhaps science should be seen as a project which, like everything else in the Universe, is in a state of constant change and development. Science is not finished; it is incomplete. Science is a map we manufacture to navigate reality, and since no map has ever had, nor can ever have 1:1 accuracy, particularly because it changes from moment to moment in time, we should not make the mistake of confusing this map with the territory it attempts (and inevitably partially fails) to describe. Nor should we deify or idolize this map, or, in pursuit of the 'objective', lose sight of what we value as human beings. As Buckminster Fuller said: "Universe is non-simultaneously apprehended" - that is, not a static noun, but a verb in motion.
The Book of the Damned is the first flowering of Fort's wonderful poetry of the peculiar. His writing style is challenging but rewarding, elliptical sometimes, direct at others, dazzling, satirical, hilarious. His philosophy is profound and life-changing. It is one of Continuity: "One measures a circle beginning anywhere," he wrote. Everything, for Fort, is in an intermediate and transient state between extremes. His philosophy, especially in his third book, "Lo!" (1932), expresses a neo-Hegelian, proto-Gaian, notion of the Universe as organism. He embraces the transience of all apparent phenomena, and was the first to coin the word 'teleportation'.
Fort may well have been one of the first to speculate that mysterious lights in the sky that have been reported for hundreds of years, might be craft from outer space. However, many of his speculations seem to be designed as 'head tests' - satirical and ludicrously fanciful, given to highlight the absurdity of conventional (pseudo) 'explanations'. He was sceptical of all human attempts to explain the world to themselves, and the idolization of such models: "I conceive of nothing, in religion, science or philosophy that is more than the proper thing to wear, for a while."
If forteanism were a religion (which of course it isn't) or a belief system (which again, it is not) then its sacred canon, its Bible so to speak, would be the collected works. There are four books: The Book of the Damned, (1919), New Lands (1923), Lo! (1931), and Wild Talents (1932). Click here to buy on line: The Complete Books of Charles Fort.
Fort's collections of reports of oddities and anomalies were not the first. Earlier examples can be found in the classic literature of cultures from ancient Greece to China. In effect, Fort's books are paper versions of freaks shows and museums of curiosities like the collections made by monarchs, such as that of the 16th Century CE Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II. But whereas most collections seem to exist for the sake of entertainment or curiosity, Fort was perhaps the first person to suggest that such anomalies had a profound importance and relevance to us beyond their entertainment value.
Fort was the first to systematically cross-reference, edit and catalogue the anomalous and present them in such a way that the cumulative effect is simply devastating to any dogmatism or narrowness of view one might have started out with. Charles Fort's work transcends the cheap vulgarity of the freak show, and mounts a profound and unassailable assault on the credulous and the dogmatic, the partisan and the reductionist; he ascends to the heights of mysticism and poetry. His is the work of a fine intellect, a beautiful imagination; ultimately, it is liberating and transformative.
His work has been valued by discerning writers since the 1920s, an inspiration to philosophers, historians of alternative culture, UFOlogists, science fiction writers, fantasists, dreamers, the dispossessed and marginalised everywhere. And he is a constant thorn in the prodigious flank of an increasingly dogmatic, scientistic establishment.
His work (and by that I mean not only the books themselves but his implicit, covert philosophical agenda) was an inspiration to the Surrealists, and resonates with their stated aim of transforming reality/mind/consciousness and everything that resembles it.
But what of Fort's own writings? Here are some selections to give you the flavour:
What is a house?
It is not possible to say what anything is, as positively distinguished from anything else, if there are no positive differences.
A barn is a house if one lives in it. If residence constitutes houseness, because style of architecture does not, then a bird's nest is a house: and human occupancy is not the standard to judge by, because we speak of dogs' houses; nor material, because we speak of snow houses of Eskimos - or a shell is a house to a hermit crab - or was to the mollusc that made it - or things seemingly so positively different as the White House at Washington and a shell on the seashore are seen to be continuous.
Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned
I believe nothing. I have shut myself away from the rocks and wisdom of ages, and from the so-called great teachers of all time, and perhaps because of that isolation I am given to bizarre hospitalities. I shut the front door upon Christ and Einstein, and at the back door hold out a welcoming hand to little frogs and periwinkles. I believe nothing of my own that I have ever written. I cannot accept that the products of minds are subject-matter for beliefs.
Charles Fort, Lo!
If we can think of our whole existence, perhaps one of countless organisms in the cosmos, as one organism, we can call its functions and distributions either organic or purposeful, or mechanically purposeful.
Charles Fort, Lo!
You have never tried to demonstrate to a hypnotic that a table is not a hippopotamus. According to our general acceptance, it would be impossible to demonstrate such a thing. Pint out a hundred reasons for saying that a hippopotamus not a table: you'll end up agreeing that neither is a table a table - it only seems like a table. Well, that's what the hippopotamus seems to be. So how can you prove that something is not something else, when neither is something else some other thing? There's nothing to prove . .
Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned
It is our expression that nothing can attempt to be, except by attempting to exclude something else: that which is commonly called "being" is 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, thee demarcation would have to be false and arbitrary, because things coloured orange, constituting continuity, would belong on both sides of the attempted border-line.
As we go along, we shall be impressed with this:
That no basis for classification, or inclusion and exclusion, more reasonable than that of redness and yellowness has ever been conceived of.
Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned
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Since 23rd May, 2004
Copyright © 2004 James Nye, Jack Phoenix, Rabbi Burns. For permission to quote, email Jack.