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BOOK OF THE DAMNED
By Charles Fort
CHAPTER: 01,
02, 03,
04, 05,
06, 07,
08, 09,
10, 11,
12, 13,
14, 15,
16, 17,
18, 19,
20, 21,
22, 23,
24, 25,
26, 27,
28
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 na�ve 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.
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.
Science has, by appeal to various bases, included a |
