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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
ANGELS.
Hordes upon hordes of them.
Beings massed like the clouds of souls, or the commingling
whiffs of spirituality, or the exhalations of souls that Dor� pictured so
often.
It may be that the Milky Way is a composition of stiff,
frozen, finally-static, absolute angels. We shall have data of little Milky
Ways, moving swiftly; or data of hosts of angels, not absolute, or still
dynamic. I suspect, myself, that the fixed stars are really fixed, and that
minute motions said to have been detected in them are illusions. I think that
the fixed stars are absolutes. Their twinkling is only the interpretation by an
intermediatist state of them. I think that soon after Leverrier died, a new
fixed star was discovered -- that, if Dr. Gray had stuck to his story of the
thousands of fishes from one pail of water, had written upon it, lectured upon
it, taken to street corners, to convince the world that, whether conceivable or
not, his explanation was the only true explanation: had thought of nothing but
this last thing at night and first thing in the morning -- his obituary --
another
"nova" reported in Monthly Notices.
I think that Milky Ways, of an inferior, or dynamic, order,
have often been seen by astronomers. Of course it may be that the phenomena that
we shall now consider are not angels at all. We are simply feeling around,
trying to find out what we can accept. Some of our data indicate hosts of rotund
and complacent tourists in inter-planetary space -- but then data of long, lean,
hungry ones. I think that there are, out in inter-planetary space Super
Tamerlanes, at the head of hosts of celestial ravagers -- which have come here and
pounced upon civilizations of the past, cleaning them up all but their bones, or
temples and monuments -- for which later historians have invented exclusionist
histories. But if something now has a legal right to us, and can enforce its
proprietorship, they've been warned off. It's the way of all exploitation. I
should say that we're now under cultivation: that we're conscious of it, but
have the impertinence to attribute it all to our own nobler and higher
instincts.
Against these notions is the same sense of finality that
opposes all advance. It's why we rate acceptance as a better adaptation than
belief. Opposing us is the strong belief that, as to inter-planetary phenomena,
virtually everything has been found out. Sense of finality and illusion of
homogeneity. But that what is called advancing knowledge is violation of the
sense of blankness.
A drop of water. Once upon a time water was considered so
homogeneous that it was thought of as an element. The microscope -- and not only
that the suppositiously elementary was seen to be of infinite diversity, b |
