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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
ASTRONOMY.
And a watchman looking at half a dozen lanterns, where a
street's been torn up.
There are gas lights and kerosene lamps and electric lights in
the neighborhood: matches flaring, fires in stoves, bonfires, house afire
somewhere; lights of automobiles, illuminated signs --
The watchman and his one little system.
Ethics.
And some young ladies and the dear old professor of a very
"select" seminary.
Drugs and divorce and rape: venereal diseases, drunkenness,
murder --
Excluded.
The prim and the precise, or the exact, the homogeneous, the
single, the puritanic, the mathematic, the pure, the perfect. We can have
illusion of this state -- but only by disregarding its infinite denials. It's a
drop of milk afloat in acid that's eating it. The positive swamped by the
negative. So it is in intermediateness, where only to "be" positive is
to generate corresponding and, perhaps, equal negativeness. In our acceptance,
it is, in quasi-existence, premonitory, or pre-natal, or pre-awakening
consciousness of a real existence.
But this consciousness of realness is the greatest resistance
to efforts to realize or to become real -- because it is feeling that realness has
been attained. Our antagonism is not to Science, but to the attitude of the
sciences that they have finally realized; or to belief, instead of acceptance;
to the insufficiency, which, as we have seen over and over, amounts to
paltriness and puerility, of scientific dogmas and standards. Or, if several
persons start out to Chicago, and get to Buffalo, and one be under the delusion
that Buffalo is Chicago, that one will be a resistance to the progress of the
others.
So astronomy and its seemingly exact, little system --
But data we shall have of round worlds and spindle-shaped
worlds, and worlds shaped like a wheel; worlds like titanic pruning hooks;
worlds linked together by streaming filaments; solitary worlds, and worlds in
hordes: tremendous worlds and tiny worlds: some of them made of material like
the material of this earth; and worlds that are geometric super-constructions
made of iron and steel --
Or not only fall from the sky of ashes and cinders and coke
and charcoal and oily substances that suggest fuel -- but the masses of iron that
have fallen upon this earth.
Wrecks and flotsam and fragments of vast iron constructions --
Or steel. Sooner or later we shall have to take up an
expression that fragments of steel have fallen from the sky. If fragments not of
iron, but of steel, have fallen upon this earth --
But what would a deep-sea fish learn even if a steel plate of
a wrecked vessel above him should drop and bump him on the nose?
Our submergence in a sea of conventionality of almost
impenetrable density.
Sometimes I'm a savage who has found something on the beach of
his island. Sometimes I'm a deep-sea fish with a sore nose.
The greatest of mysteries:
Why don't they ever come here, or send here, openly?
Of course there's nothing to that mystery if we don't take so
seriously the notion -- that we must be interesting. It's probably for moral
reasons that they stay away -- but even so, there must be some degraded ones among
them.
Or physical reasons:
When we can specially take up that subject, one of our leading
ideas, or credulities, will be that near approach by another world to this world
would be catastrophic: that navigable worlds would avoid proximity; that others
that have survived have organized into protective remotenesses, or orbits which
approximate to regularity, though by no means to the degree of popular
supposition.
But the persistence of the notion that we must be interesting.
Bugs and germs and things like that: they're interesting to us: some of them are
too interesting.
Dangers of near approach -- nevertheless our own ships that dare
not venture close onto a rocky shore can send rowboats ashore --
Why not diplomatic relations established between the United
States and Cyclorea -- which, in our advanced astronomy, is the name of a
remarkable wheel-shaped world or super-construction? Why not missionaries sent
here openly to convert us from our barbarous prohibitions and other taboos, and
to prepare the way for a good trade in ultra-bibles and super-whiskeys; fortunes
made in selling us cast-off super-fineries, which we'd take to like an African
chief to some one's old silk hat from New York or London?
The answer that occurs to me is so simple that it seems
immediately acceptable, if we accept that the obvious is the solution of all
problems, or if most of our perplexities consist in laboriously and painfully
conceiving of the unanswerable, and then looking for answers -- using such words
as "obvious" and "solution" conventionally --
Or:
Would we, if we could, educate and sophisticate pigs, geese,
cattle?
Would it be wise to establish diplomatic relation with the hen
that now functions, satisfied with mere sense of achievement by way of
compensation?
I think we're property.
I should say we belong to something:
That once upon a time, this earth was No-man's Land, that
other worlds explored and colonized here, and fought among themselves for
possession, but that now it's owned by something:
That something owns this earth -- all others warned off.
Nothing in our own times -- perhaps -- because I am thinking of
certain notes I have -- has ever appeared upon this earth, from somewhere else, so
openly as Columbus landed upon San Salvador, or as Hudson sailed up his river.
But as to surreptitious visits to this earth, in recent times, or as to
emissaries, perhaps, from other worlds, or voyagers who have shown every
indication of intent to evade or avoid, we shall have data as convincing as our
data of oil or coal-burning aerial super-constructions.
But, in this vast subject, I shall have to do considerable
neglecting or disregarding, myself. I don't see how I can, in this book, take up
all the subject of possible use of humanity to some other mode of existence, or
the flattering notion that we can possibly be worth something.
Pigs, geese, cattle.
First find out they are owned.
Then find out the whyness of it.
I suspect that, after all, we're useful -- that among contesting
claimants, adjustment has occurred, or that something now has a legal right to
us, by force, or by having paid out analogues of beads for us to former, more
primitive, owners of us -- all others warned off -- that all this has been known,
perhaps for ages, to certain ones upon this earth, a cult or order, members of
which function like bellwethers to the rest of us, or as superior slaves or
overseers, directing us in ac |
