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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
SO then, it is our expression that Science relates to real
knowledge no more than does the growth of a plant, or the organization of a
department store, or the development of a nation: that all are assimilative, or
organizing, or systematizing processes that represent different attempts to
attain the positive state -- the state commonly called heaven, I suppose I mean.
There can be no real science where there are indeterminate
variables, but every variable is, in finer terms, indeterminate, or irregular,
if only to have the appearance of being in Intermediateness is to express
regularity unattained. The invariable, or the real and stable, would be nothing
at all in Intermediateness -- rather as, but in relative terms, an undistorted
interpretation of external sounds in the mind of a dreamer could not continue to
exist in a dreaming mind, because that touch of relative realness would be of
awakening and not of dreaming. Science is the attempt to awaken to realness,
wherein it is attempt to find regularity and uniformity. Or the regular and
uniform would be that which has nothing external to disturb it. By the universal
we mean the real. Or the notion is that the underlying super-attempt, as
expressed in Science, is indifferent to the subject-matter of Science: that the
attempt to regularize is the vital spirit. Bugs and stars and chemical messes:
that they are only quasi-real, and that of them there is nothing real to know;
but that systemization of pseudo-data is approximation to realness or final
awakening --
Or a dreaming mind -- and its centaurs and canary birds that
turn into giraffes -- there could be no real biology upon such subjects, but
attempt, in a dreaming mind, to systematize such appearances would be movement
toward awakening -- if better mental co-ordination is all that we mean by the
state of being awake -- relatively awake.
So it is, that having attempted to systematize, by ignoring
externality to the greatest possible degree, the notion of things dropping in
upon this earth, from externality, is as unsettling and as unwelcome to Science
as -- tin horns blowing in upon a musician's relatively symmetric composition --
flies alighting upon a painter's attempted harmony, and tracking
colors one into another -- suffragist getting up and making a political speech at
a prayer meeting.
If all things are of a oneness, which is a state intermediate
to unrealness and realness, and if nothing has succeeded in breaking away and
establishing entity for itself, and could not continue to "exist" in
intermediateness, if it should succeed, any more than could the born still at
the same time be the uterine, I of course know of no positive difference between
Science and Christian Science -- and the attitude of both toward the unwelcome is
the same -- "it does not exist."
A Lord Kelvin and a Mrs. Eddy, and something not to their
liking -- it does not exist.
Of course not, we Intermediates say: but, also, that, in
Intermediateness, neither is there absolute non-existence.
Or a Christian Scientist and a toothache -- neither exists in
the final sense: also neither is absolutely non-existent, and, according to our
therapeutics, the one that more highly approximates to realness will win.
A secret of power --
I think it's another profundity.
Do you want power over something?
Be more nearly real than it.
We'll begin with yellow substances that have fallen upon this
earth: we'll see whether our data of them have a higher approximation to
realness than have the dogmas of those who deny their existence -- that is, as
products from somewhere external to this earth.
In mere impressionism we take our stand. We have no positive
tests nor standards. Realism in art: realism in science -- they pass away. In
1859, the thing to do was to accept Darwinism; now many biologists are revolting
and trying to conceive of something else. The thing to do was to accept it in
its day, but Darwinism of course was never proved:
The fittest survive.
What is meant by the fittest?
Not the strongest; not the cleverest --
Weakness and stupidity everywhere survive.
There is no way of determining fitness except in that a thing
does survive.
"Fitness," then, is only another name for
"survival."
Darwinism:
That survivors survive.
Although Darwinism, then, seems positively baseless, or
absolutely irrational, its massing of supposed data, and its attempted coherence
approximate more highly to Organization and Consistency than did the inchoate
speculations that preceded it.
Or that Columbus never proved that the earth is round.
Shadow of the earth on the moon?
No one has ever seen it in its entirety. The earth's shadow is
much larger than the moon. If the periphery of the shadow is curved -- but the
convex moon -- a straight-edged object will cast a curved shadow upon a surface
that is convex.
All the other so-called proofs may be taken up in the same
way. It was impossible for Columbus to prove that the earth is round. It was not
required: only that with a higher seeming of positiveness than that of his
opponents, he should attempt. The thing to do, in 1492, was nevertheless to
accept that beyond Europe, to the west, were other lands.
I offer for acceptance, as something concordant with the
spirit of this first quarter of the 20th century, the expression that beyond
this earth are -- other lands -- from which come things as, from America, float
things to Europe.
As to yellow substances that have fallen upon this earth, the
endeavor to exclude extra-mundane origins is the dogma that all yellow rains and
yellow snows are colored with pollen from this earth's pine trees. Symons'
Meteorological Magazine is especially prudish in this respect and regards
as highly improper all advances made by other explainers.
Nevertheless, the Monthly Weather Review, May, 1877,
reports a golden-yellow fall, of Feb. 27, 1877, at Peckloh, Germany, in which
four kinds of organisms, not pollen, were the coloring matter. There were minute
things shaped like arrows, coffee beans, horns, and disks.
They may have been symbols. They may have been objective
hieroglyphics --
Mere passing fancy -- let it go --
In the Annales de Chimie, 85-288, there is a list of
rains said to have contained sulphur. I have thirty or forty other notes. I'll
not use one of them. I'll admit that every one of them is upon a fall of pollen.
I said, to begin with, that our methods would be the methods of theologians and
scientists, and they always begin with an appearance of liberality. I grant
thirty or forty points to start with. I'm as liberal as any of them -- or that my
liberality won't cost me anything -- the enormousness of the data that we shall
have.
Or just to look over a typical instance of this dogma, and the
way it works out:
In the American Journal of Science, 1-42-196, we are
told of a yellow substance that fell by the bucketful upon a vessel, one
"windless" night in June, in Pictou Harbour, Nova Scotia. The writer
analyzed the substance, and it was found to "give off nitrogen and ammonia
and an animal odor."
Now, one of our Intermediatist principles, to start with, is
that so far from positive, in the aspect of Homogeneousness, are all substances,
that, at least in what is called an elementary sense, anything can be found
anywhere. Mahogany logs on the coast of Greenland; bugs of a valley on top of
Mt. Blanc; atheists at a prayer meeting; ice in India. For instance, chemical
analysis can reveal that almost any dead man was poisoned with arsenic, we'll
say, because there is no stomach without some iron, lead, tin, gold, arsenic in
it and of it -- which, of course, in a broader sense, doesn't matter much, because
a certain number of persons must, as a restraining influence, be executed for
murder every year; and, if detectives aren't able really to detect anything,
illusion of their success is all that is necessary, and it is very honorable to
give up one's life for society as a whole.
The chemist who analyzed the substance of Pictou sent a sample
to the Editor of the Journal. The Editor of course found pollen in it.
My own acceptance is that there'd have to be some pollen in
it: that nothing could very well fall through the air, in June, near the pine
forests of Nova Scotia, and escape all floating spores of pollen. But the Editor
does not say that this substance "contained" pollen. He disregards
"nitrogen and ammonia, and an animal odor," and says that the
substance was pollen. For the sake of our thirty or forty tokens of liberality,
or pseudo-liberality, if we can't be really liberal, we grant that the chemist
of the first examination probably wouldn't know an animal odor if he were
janitor of a menagerie. As we go along, however, there can be no such sweeping
ignoring of this phenomenon:
The fall of animal-matter from the sky.
I'd suggest, to start with, that we'd put ourselves in the
place of deep-sea fishes:
How would they account for the fall of animal-matter from
above?
They wouldn't try --
Or it's easy enough to think of most of us as deep-sea fishes
of a kind.
Jour. Franklin Inst., 90-11:
That, upon the 14th of February, 1870, there fell, at Genoa,
Italy, according to Director Boccardo, of the Technical Institute of Genoa, and
Prof. Castellani, a yellow substance. But the microscope revealed numerous
globules of cobalt blue, also corpuscles of a pearly color that resembled
starch. See Nature, 2-166.
Comptes Rendus, 56-972:
M. Bouis says of a substance, reddish varying to yellowish,
that fell enormously and successively, or upon April 30, May 1 and May 2, in
France and Spain, that it carbonized and spread the odor of charred animal
matter -- that it was not pollen-- that in alcoh |
