|
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
THE New Dominant.
Inclusionism.
In it we have a pseudo-standard.
We have a datum, and we give it an interpretation, in
accordance with our pseudo-standard. At present we have not the delusions of
Absolutism that may have translated some of the positivists of the nineteenth
century to heaven. We are Intermediatists -- but feel a lurking suspicion that we
may some day solidify and dogmatize and illiberalize into higher positivists. At
present we do not ask whether something be reasonable or preposterous, because
we recognize that by reasonableness and preposterousness are meant agreement and
disagreement with a standard -- which must be a delusion -- though not absolutely,
of course -- and must some day be displaced by a more advanced quasi-delusion.
Scientists in the past have taken the positivist attitude -- is this or that
reasonable or unreasonable? Analyze them and we find that they meant relatively
to a standard, such as Newtonism, Daltonism, Darwinism, or Lyellism. But they
have written and spoken and thought as if they could mean real reasonableness
and real unreasonableness.
So our pseudo-standard is Inclusionism, and, if a datum be a
correlate to a more widely inclusive outlook as to this earth and its
externality and relations with externality, its harmony with Inclusionism admits
it. Such was the process, and such was the requirement for admission in the days
of the Old Dominant: our difference is in underlying Intermediatism, or
consciousness that though we're more nearly real, we and our standards are only
quasi--
Or that all things -- in our intermediate state -- are phantoms in
a super-mind in a dreaming state -- but striving to awaken to realness.
Though in some respects our own Intermediatism is
unsatisfactory, our underlying feeling is--
That in a dreaming mind awakening is accelerated -- if phantoms
in that mind know that they're only phantoms in a dream. Of course, they too are
quasi, or -- but in a relative sense -- they have an essence of what is called
realness. They are derived from experience or from sense-relations, even though
grotesque distortions. It seems acceptable that a table that is seen when one is
awake is more nearly real than a dreamed table, which, with fifteen or twenty
legs, chases one.
So now, in the twentieth century, with a change of terms, and
a change in underlying consciousness, our attitude toward the New Dominant is
the attitude of the scientists of the nineteenth century to the Old Dominant. We
do not insist that our data and interpretations shall be as shocking, grotesque,
evil, ridiculous, childish, insincere, laughable, ignorant to nineteenth-centuryites
as were their data and interpretations to the medieval-minded. We ask only
whether data and interpretations correlate. If they do, they are acceptable,
perhaps only for a short time, or as nuclei, or scaffolding, or preliminary
sketches, or as gropings and tentativenesses. Later, of course, when we cool off
and harden and radiate into space most of our present mobility, which expresses
modesty and plasticity, we shall acknowledge no scaffoldings, gropings or
tentativenesses, but think we utter absolute facts. A point in Intermediatism
here is opposed to most current speculations upon Development. Usually one
thinks of the spiritual as higher than the material, but, in our acceptance,
quasi-existence is a means by which the absolutely immaterial materializes
absolutely, and, being intermediate, is a state in which nothing is finally
either immaterial or material, all objects, substances, thoughts, occupying some
grade of approximation one way or the other. Final solidification of the
ethereal is, to us, the goal of cosmic ambition. Positivism is Puritanism. Heat
is Evil. Final Good is Absolute Frigidity. An Arctic winter is very beautiful,
but I think that an interest in monkeys chattering in palm trees accounts for
our own Intermediatism.
Visitors.
Our confusion here, out of which we are attempting to make
quasi-order is as great as it has been throughout this book, because we have not
the positivist's delusion of homogeneity. A positivist would gather all data
that seem to relate to one kind of visitors and coldly disregard all other data.
I think of as many different kinds of visitors to this earth as there are
visitors to New York, to a jail, to a church -- some persons go to church to pick
pockets, for instance.
My own acceptance is that either a world or a vast
super-construction -- or a world, if red substances and fishes fell from it --
hovered over India in the summer of 1860. Something then fell from
somewhere, July 17, 1860, at Dhurmsalla. Whatever "it" was,
"it" is so persistently alluded to as "a meteorite" that I
look back and see that I adopted this convention myself. But in the London Times,
Dec. 26, 1860, Syed Abdoolah, Professor of Hindustani, University College,
London, writes that he had sent to a friend in Dhurmsalla, for an account of the
stones that had fallen at that place. The answer:
"...divers forms and sizes, many of which bore a great
resemblance to ordinary cannon balls just discharged from the engines of
war."
It's an addition to our data of spherical objects that have
arrived upon this earth. Note that they are spherical stone objects.
And in the evening of this same day that something --
took a
shot at Dhurmsalla -- or sent objects upon which there may have been decipherable
markings -- lights were seen in the air--
I think, myself, of a number of things, beings, whatever they
were, trying to get down, but resisted, like balloonists, at a certain altitude,
trying to get farther up, but resisted.
Not in the least except to good positivists, or the
homogeneous-minded, does this speculation interfere with the concept of some
other world that is in successful communication with certain esoteric ones upon
this earth, by a code of symbols that print in rock, like symbols of
telephotographers in selenium.
I think that sometimes, in favorable circumstances, emissaries
have come to this earth -- secret meetings--
Of course it |
