A Space-Pig on Broadway! -- Charles Fort's New Lands (Part Three)

(NOTE: The quotes below are from the Sacred Texts version of Charles Fort's New Lands. A link to the rights-free version of the book is below.

Charles Fort's New Lands)

One of the biggest frustrations for me with Charles Fort's classic of paranormal studies, Book of the Damned, was that it ended with a discussion of phenomena that seemed very much like they could point to the existence of bigfoot. However, Fort seemed to relate these phenomena to us as an illustration that bigfoot didn't exist and that, in fact, the chances of the actual living presence of strange creatures, either from this world or other worlds, were rather slim.

It seemed to me that Fort was trying to resist the idea of the existence of beings other than natural, earthly beings on earth because he was afraid of the force that could be embodied in paranormal beings. So I hoped that, as Charles Fort's work progressed, he would accept the actual presence of beings into his work.

Throughout New Lands, Fort seems to do this, from time to time. He does this, though, in the form of what he calls "mirages," or phantom forms appearing in the sky. These phantom forms are mainly of soldiers -- sometimes of entire troops of soldiers. But there still isn't a real feeling that we are looking at living presences in the sky. Fort himself is very dodgy on what the phenomena of the sky-mirages could actually be. Reflections? Imaginations? Disguised worlds?

But finally, at the end of the third to last chapter of New Lands, an alien finally appears on earth. This alien is -- that's right -- a space-pig. It's a very strange-looking creature, especially for a pig.

Now, those who have read the book will be quick to remind me that the space-pig Fort has parading down Broadway at the end of his book is "just" a product of Fort's imagination. That is true. Fort structures his book with three main elements: data, in the form, usually, of notes from journals; philosophy, in the form, either of Fort's arguments against the scientists or Fort's own Neo-scientific arguments; and imagination, in the form of Fort's own poetic expressions, inspired by, as opposed to deduced from, the data and philosophy.

But I would also argue that Fort's use of data is more like -- well, like how Joseph Cornell might cut pictures out of magazines and put them into his dioramas; or, again, how Henry Darger might trace pictures of little girls out of coloring books, put tiny, little penises on half of them, and throw them all into adventures the likes of which had never been seen, this side of Japan's magical-girl anime.

Fort's data is used as a kind of "found footage." And Fort uses his data to express, not just his genuine philosophical beliefs about the universe, but -- I really believe this -- his own personal psychological development, from crisis to conversion.

So the fact that Fort sometimes uses his own imagination alongside the data, when it comes to the aspect of psychological development, isn't of much concern to me. And -- it has to be noted -- Charles Fort is extremely thorough in discriminating between the data and his own imagination. His data is always very clearly stated as data. And his imagination is... hard to mistake for anything else.

But the simple fact that Fort would allow, even in his imagination, an alien finally to touch the earth, means that he's probably made a huge step in his psychological development. Finishing the Book of the Damned, I had an idea of where New Lands would go. But I'm not sure how Fort's next book, Lo!, will go, in terms of Fort's own psychological development.

Now, the people who have read my previous posts know that I'm a part-time paraphilic infantilist, or an adult baby. That means that my personal fetish, i.e. what turns me on, is pretending I'm a baby, or a little child.

So, as I finished the first third of Fort's New Lands, I was actually really excited by a passage where he speaks of our so-called Solar System (which Fort eventually begins calling a Geo-System) as a Super-Embryonic System. In other words, the Solar System is just a gigantic womb!

At first, finishing up the first third of the book, I thought that this would simply be another one of Fort's whimsical imaginings, that my adult baby sensibilities had a bit of play, and that I'd go on with the rest of Fort's book. But it turns out that Fort's embryonic analogy continues all throughout the book, forming, I believe, the real substratum to his whole philosophical approach to the book.

I think the obvious reason for the embryo analogy is the fact that if you have hope for the world, you usually believe that the world's coming to consciousness of itself, it's getting smarter. You hear people say things like "dawn of consciousness" all the time. Our world is dawning, or, as the old philosophers may have said, "nascent," or, in the process of being born. So it's easy to imagine the world as fetal or embryonic, if it's nascent, or dawning.

But I think Fort had his own personal reason for making this choice. Fort's Blakean imagination was so strong that, if he had given it enough power, it would really carried him away. Even with the protective measures Fort puts upon himself, he still often risks being carried away right to the skies by his imagination. For instance, he almost explodes with prophetic ecstasy in this Whitman-esque passage:

"Char me the trunk of a redwood tree. Give me the pages of white chalk cliffs to write upon. Magnify me thousands of times, and replace my trifling immodesties with a titanic megalomania -- then might I write largely enough for our subject."

Plus, I believe, Fort was such a sensitive man -- probably psychically sensitive, as well as emotionally sensitive -- that he could easily have been carried away by the psychic and emotional influences of the world.

If that was the case, and I believe it was, Fort needed as much tying down and binding in as possible. He needed containment -- as *my own* psychiatrist might say. He needed a womb-like atmosphere of security and seclusion, so that his own psychological structure could develop. And this, I believe, is why Fort made the embryonic analogy the real backbone of his theory.

I think there are two really interesting passages that point to the fact that Fort saw himself, in his sensitive condition, as being as vulnerable as an unborn baby or a little child, and in need of either containment or some kind of rational, parental protection. In the first instance, Fort imagines the scene of the rushing, towering, thundering Niagara Falls. But he imagines this scene -- from inside the womb of a pregnant woman!

"A pregnant woman stands over Niagara Falls. There are sounds, and they are vast circumstances; but the cells of an unborn being respond, or vibrate, only as they do to disturbances in their own little environment. Horizons pour into a gulf, and thunder rolls upward: embryonic consciousness is no more than slight perturbances of maternal indigestion. It is exclusionism."

Fort believes that exclusionism, which is the real structure of current science, is necessary, to a degree. It keeps things out of the system which would be too much for the system, at its current stage of development, to process. If the system received too much information at once, it wouldn't be able to process. It would fail. Thus exclusionism, though harmful if overdone, is necessary, to a degree.

Fort likens exclusionism, in its different degrees, as science develops, to the convention parents and teacher have of giving kids certain amounts of knowledge as they develop, and as they are more and more able to process the information given to them. Again, it's easy to imagine Fort, in the following passage, imagining himself in the vulnerable role of the child in need of protection and restraint.

"The story of every industry tells of inventions that were resisted, but that were finally admitted. ... Early astronomers could scarcely have systematized their doctrine had they been bewildered by seven or eight hundred planetary bodies; and that, besides the functions of the astronomers, according to our expressions, there was also their usefulness in breaking down the walls of the older, outlived, orthodoxy. We conceive that it is well that a great deal of experience should be withheld from childrean, and that, any way, in their early years, they are sexually isolated, for instance, and our idea is that our data have been held back by no outspoken conspiracy, but by an inhibition similar to that by which a great deal of biology, for instance, is not taught to children."

In the second to last chapter of New Lands, Fort develops his idea of the embryonic condition of the Geo-system very beautifully. Fort thinks of this so-called Solar System, or Geo-system, as Fort calls it, as an "incubating organism, of which this earth is the nucleus."

Fort makes it clear that the analogy of an embryo is just that: an analogy, and that the Geo-system is "strongly characterized by conditions and features of its own." But it's a good enough analogy, and Fort continues to employ it.

If this Geo-system, of which the earth is the center, while the sun and the planets either revolve around the earth, around the sun, or in other strange orbits, is like a womb, then the meteors act as part of an umbilical system, bringing in nutrition from the outside, the nutrition generally being a form of electricity. Meteors enter the Geo-system through holes in the womb, which we think of as distant stars, which are the other part of the umbilical nutrition system.

Fort expresses his disagreement with the doctrine of evolution. He rather believes this Geo-system, and all of its components, including living organisms, are developing according to a design. But this design is, again, like the "design" that causes an embryo to develop the way it does. There is a "genetics," one might say, to all of the development of our Geo-system. Fort says of this system:

"It is not altogether anti-Darwiniam: the concept of Development replaces the concept of Evolution, but we accept the process of Selection, not to anything loosely known as Environment, but relatively to underlying Schedule and Design, predetermined and supervised, as it were, but by nothing that we conceive of in anthropomorphic terms."

There is a regulating force in the Geo-system, Fort believes, just as there is a regulating force in the development of an embryo, which allows certain actions and materials to increase in harmony with the current development of the embryo, while, at that specific stage, other actions and materials are held back, or inhibited.

Thus, everything has its time. Fort believes that even inventions and ideas, in this Geo-system of ours, have their time.

"There are data for the acceptance that all things, in wider being, are held back as well as protected and prepared for, and not permitted to develop before comes scheduled time. Langley's flying machine makes me think of something of the kind -- that this machine was premature; that it appeared a little before the era of aviation upon this earth, and that therefore Langley could not fly. But this machine was capable of flying, because, some years later, Curtiss did fly in it. Then one thinks that the Wright Brothers were successful, because they did synchronize with a scheduled time."

Now -- two things about this passage really quickly. He mentions the idea of a premature technology. Earlier on in the book, he also talks about premature ideas. So Fort is really talking about premature theory! That's pretty exciting to me, for obvious reasons.

But the other thing about this passage -- even though I *know* Fort knew Marx' and Hegels ideas, I'm pretty sure that he also knew Freud's ideas, and probably Jung's. But I'm sure, in spite of what Fort knew of Jung, Fort came up, in the passage above, with a basic idea of synchronicity, before Jung came up with the developed idea.

Fort then compares the development of human ideologies with the development of the embryo, in that the embryo uses different types of cells in order to reach different levels of development, but that these cells are destryoed by the next phase of cells, which signify the next level of development. Reflecting on this analogy, Fort says:

"Human reason is tropism, or response to stimuli, and reasoning is the trial-and-error process of the most primitive unicellular organisms, a susceptibility to underlying mandates, then a grouping in perhaps all possible distortions until adjustment with underlying requirements is reached.

"The mind that responds, perhaps not to stimulus, but to requirement, which seems to be a negative stimulus, and so conceives, is in adjustment, and reaches the state known as success."

Fort then repeats his belief that isolation is just as important for the healthy development of an embryo -- be it human embryo or Geo-systemic embryo -- as is the process of expansion:

"It is our expression that temporary isolations characterize embryonic growth and super-embryonic growth quite as distincly as do expansions and coordinations. Local centers of development in an egg -- and they are isolated before they sketch out attempting relations. Or in a wider being -- hemisphere isolated from hemisphere, and nation from nation -- then the breaking down of barriers -- the appearance of Japan out of obscurity -- threads of a military plasm are cast across an ocean by the United States."

Fort concludes his embryonic theory with a very beautiful passage -- although I believe that this passage, once again, distorts his ideas regarding the sky-mirages:

"Embryonic heavens that thave dreamed -- and that their mirages will be realized some day. Sounds and an interval; sounds and the same interval; sounds again -- that there is one integrating organism and that we have heard its pulse."

Fort's view of the universe is obviously different from the current scientific view of the universe -- the one which just today, I believe, released documents regarding the probable non-viability of the Kepler planets. One might tend to think of Fort's view of the universe as medieval. But I think if Fort tried to push his view of the universe on the medieval people, he'd suffer a worse fate than Giordano Bruno suffered in enlightened times.

But Fort's ideas are based on three very pre-Copernican ideas. One: the earth is at the center of the Geo-system. Two: the earth neither revolves nor rotates. And three: the force of gravitation either doesn't exist or else is very weak.

It's easy enough to see, from a psychological standpoint, why Fort would be interested in arguing for these three ideas. If the earth is the fetus, it would, hopefully, be the center of the womb, and the most important thing in it. If the earth neither revolves nor rotates, there is less movement to be constantly concerned about. In other words, the fetus can brood in one still place. And if gravitation doesn't exist, but one is in the womb, one could imagine oneself floating in a limited space, but secure within that space.

But I think there's another, less psychoanalytic, reason that Fort would argue for these somewhat archaic seeming ideas. This would be based on an idea I first got from my favorite writer of all, George Bernard Shaw -- to whom, by the way, Fort refers in New Lands, pointing out that Shaw believes the moon is only thirty-seven miles away from the earth!

Shaw said that human technology is outpacing human morality. We are developing technologies at a wildly fast rate. We have the weapons to wipe out civilization in an instant, nowadays. But, Shaw says, we still have the morality of the medieval times. Why aren't we working on improving our morality, Shaw asks, as hard as we are on improving our technology?

Well -- I'm sure that Fort saw the same passage of Shaw that I read. God knows, both Fort and I have spent hours and hours at the New York Public Library -- although Fort's hours dwarf mine. But I think Fort put his characteristic spin on the idea. What I think he did, actually, was put a Forto-Hegelian spin on the idea.

I believe that Fort thought that our morality must, in order to catch up to our technology, first go back, to the point where our morality and our technology separated from each other. And I believe that Fort thought the way for our morality to do that was by taking the science of that time as a basis for the morality of the time. From this point, we, as scientific moralists, could build up a new morality, allow it to make a new progress.

This would be -- I think -- a version of Hegelian sublation: simply put, it would be dropping down a level, in order to go up two levels.

But I also think that, plain and simply, Fort was building a universe out of genuine data, and was building a universe for his imagination. The data, which was genuine and honest, if nothing else, provided evidence for Fort's imagination of the universe. And Fort's imagination of the universe could really expand, could probably expand way beyond the bounds, even, of what a modern conventional scientists would currently think were the bounds of our universe!

So Fort, in order not to get carried away, had to tie himself down to a smaller universe, a systematic universe that his imagination could work with.

But, moving from these ideas, there are some other theories to Fort's work that are very interesting. One is Fort's idea of "difference of potential," which kind of replaces the law of gravitation as a major effective factor in the Geo-system.

Fort takes his idea of difference of potential from the basics of electricity. Very basically, voltage in an electrical system is the measure of difference in electrical potential in a system. One could also think of it as the ability that one end of a system has to receive the flow of electrons from another end of a system.

Fort believes that difference of potential doesn't just have to be electric. If any two systems are placed in proximity, and if they be very similar, with some differences, the differences will create a difference in potential, which will create interaction between the two systems. This interaction will be a flow of whatever elements have created the difference of potential. Fort says:

"Let two objects be generically similar, but specifically different, and a relation that may be known as a difference of potential, though that term is generally confined to electric relations, generates between them. ... Given proximity, we conceive of relations between [objects] other than gravitational."

Fort's objects are generally planets, meteors, or spaceships which approach the earth. When these ships approach the earth closely, Fort claims, phenomena like earthquakes, as well as more anomalous phenomena, such as rains of strange objects down on our earth, or large objects from our own earth being pulled up into the air, occur. This is not due to the gravitation of the two planets, Fort says, but to the interaction of the two systems, as a result of their difference of potential.

Fort believes that Mars passes close enough to earth almost to graze us. The moon is only a couple hundred miles away from us. And these two bodies occasionally take chances to communicate with us. The communications we receive from Mars occur when Mars is closest to us.

One large body of communications we receive from Mars are blinking lights seen to flash on the very surface of Mars. But another series of phenomena we receive are actual concussions in the sky, huge crashings in the sky that sound like cannon fire, or even earthquakes. These sounds usually come in some sort of rhythmic way. Fort knows that these rhythms have been recorded. And he believes that the rhythms can be analyzed, to reveal the messages of the communications. In fact, Fort himself has attempted to analyze some of these rhythms.

Venus, in its passage through the Geo-system, also has moments of close approach to the earth. However, when Venus approaches the earth, it doesn't communicate with the earth. Instead, it actually sends out spacecraft, to visit the earth. These visitations, interestingly enough, according to Fort, don't occur at the closest points of Venus to earth, but usually five weeks before and after that point, when Venus is brightest in the sky.

These visitations are, though, often accompanied by the phenomena usually described as earthquakes. The phenomena usually run -- I think -- in this order: a sighting of an object in the sky, a loud, crashing sound in the sky, and earthquake-like phenomena, as well as events such as rains of strange objects.

But these phenomena aren't just limited to visitations from Venusian spacecraft. They can occur when other celestial bodies pass near us. The difference of potential creates an interaction in the system. And these cataclysmic effects occur.

In the passage below, Fort mentions an event in Michigan, in 1919, and then broadens his statment out to discuss similar occurrences.

"There was a shock in Michigan, November 27, 1919. In many cities, persons rushed from their homes, thinking that there had been an earthquake. But in Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan, a 'blinding glare' was seen in the sky. Our acceptance is, that this occurrence is, upon a small scale, of the type of many catastrophes in Italy and South America, for instance, where just such 'blinding glares' have been seen in the sky, data of which have been expressed by scientists, or of data which have not impressed conventional scientists."

Fort, in his Book of the Damned, provides some powerful illustrations from his data, of transfers of material between the earth and the spaceships or celestial bodies approaching it. And the theory of a difference of potential as the driving factor is one way of expressing this process.

But I think Fort also provides a more whimsical expression in the passage below, which seems reminiscent to me of the connection romance, I mean passionate romance, has with the exchange of genetic information between two bodies during the reproductive process. Fort imagines an ancient visitation from a spacecraft to earth, which led to a material interaction between the bodies. Fort, by the way, believes that very ancient interactions actually were powerful enough to cause rains of *dinosaurs*.

"If poetry is imagery, and if a flow of images be solid poetry, such a recitation was there in three-dimensional hyperbole that was probably seen, or overheard, and criticized in Mars, and condemned for its extravagance in Jupiter. Some other world, meeting this earth, ransacking his solid imagination and uttering her living metaphors: singing a flood of mastadons, purring her butterflies, bellowing an ardor of buffaloes. Sailing away -- sneaking up close to the planet Venus, murmuring her antelopes, or arching his periphery, and spitting horses at her --

"Poor degenerate times -- nowadays something comes close to this earth and lisps little commonplaces to her --"

Such as, I would suppose, rains of blood or rains of frogs.

I'd like to end this post with a few of the more interesting pieces of data that Fort presents -- including the space-pig episodes.

In my last post, I mentioned two women who were actually injured by matter that had apparently fallen from space. In this final section of New Lands, Fort actually gives a number of instances of men being injured by, and even dying from, contact with these extraterrestrial phenomena.

In this instance, from 1875, a man was struck, and injured, by something he assumed was a musket ball, though he never found the missile which had injured him.

"A man was trundling a cart from Schaffhausen, near Beringen, Germany. His right arm was perforated from front to back, as if by a musket ball. Thisman had two companions. He heard a whirring sound, but his companions had heard nothing. At one side of the road there were laborers in a field, but they were not within gunshot distance. Whatever the missile may have been, it was unfindable."

Fort also lists an instance similar to this, from 1886, where a man, walking toward Pall Mall, in England, had his jacket sizzled on the shoulder -- as if, we'd nowadays think, a laser beam had cut it. He never found out what had done the strange thing to him. But scientists assumed it had been a very small meteorite.

In this instance, from 1886, Fort lists some rather disturbing deaths and disorientations which resulted from a supposed lightning strike.

"A man and his three sons were pulling corn on a farm. Nothing is said of meteorologic conditions, and, for all I know, they may have been pulling corn in a violent thunder storm. Something that is said to have been lightning flashed from the sky. The man was slightly impaired, one son killed, the other seriously injured -- the third had disappeared. 'What has become of him is not known, but it is supposed that he was blinded or crazed by the shock, or wandered away.'"

In the instance below, an entire troop of soldiers was struck by an "unknown force."

"It is said that in 1893, nineteen soldiers were marching near Bourges, France, when they were struck by an unknown force. It is said that in known terms there is no explanation. Some of the men were killed, and others were struck insensible. At the inquest it was testified that there had been no storm, and that nothing had been heard."

Another man, in 1895, attempted to shield himself from the blast of something he saw falling:

"In the period of primary maximum brilliance of Venus, a luminous object, it is said, was seen in the sky, in day time, by someone in Donegal, Ireland. Upon this day, a boy, Robert Alcorn, saw a large luminous object falling from the sky. It exploded near him. The boy... put his hands over his face: there was a second explosion, shattering his fingers."

In 1891, one of these explosions caused a commotion, very near to where I live nowadays!, in Brooklyn:

"Two men, Smith Morehouse and William Owen, were walking in Vanderbilt Avenue, Brooklyn, about 2 o'clock, afternoon of March 16th, when a terrific explosioun occurred close to the head of Morehouse, injuring him and stunning Owen, the flash momentarily blinding both. Morehouse's face was covered with marks like powder-marks, and his tongue was pierced."

It was the first, but not the last, pierced tongue in Brooklyn. But let me continue the story.

"With no one else to accuse, the police arrested Owen, but held him upon the technical charge of intoxication. Morehouse was taken to a hospital, where a splinter of metal, considered either brass or copper, but not a fragment of a cartridge, was removed from his tongue. No other material could be found, though an object of considerable size had exploded. Morehouse's hat had been perforated in six places by unfindable substances."

Among the many instances of lights in the sky, either as communication or visitation, there are a few where a really interesting kind of spacecraft is made visible. I'll take this one as a good example, since it kind of relates to the imagery of the space-pig. This sighting occurred in Benton, Texas, in 1897. It was seen at first as a dark object that crossed the moon. But a closer look was obtained:

"It was shaped like a Mexican cigar, large in the middle, and small at both ends, with great wings, resembling those of an enormous butterfly. It was brilliantly illuminated by the rays of two great searchlights, and was sailing in a southeasterly direction, with the velocity of the wind, presenting a magnificent appearance."

This spacecraft was thought to have similarities with a spacecraft seen around the same time, first in Kansas City, Missouri, and then in Chicago, Illinois. The spacecraft was also described as having red, white, and green lights.

And now to what Fort calls the "tragedy of the space-pig," an event that occurred in Llagollen, Wales, in 1905.

"It is an intensely black object, about two miles above the earth's surface, moving at the rate of about 20 miles per hour. [Later, the object was] examined through powerful field-glasses. We are told that it had short wings, and flew, or moved, in a way described as 'casually inclining sideways.' It seemed to have four legs, and looked to be about ten feet long. According to several witnesses it looked like a huge, winged pig, with webbed feet."

After this flying pig (that'll be the day!) passed, Llagollen was showered with a red-purple-colored rain.

So, this is the tragedy of the space-pig, wandering through space. But how does Fort meet tragedy? With triumph! Or... so I believe. Read this poetic passage by Fort, and see if the description of the alien being paraded through the streets of New York City doesn't sound like the space-pig who had been spotted floating over Wales.

The passage relates to one of the pioneer space-explorers Fort imagines will discover the phenomena of the worlds he has posited. The space-explorer is something of a prospector, something of a prophet, and something of a pariah:

"Insulted and abused and finally hounded to his death. But, in the procession, he will lead by the nose an outrageous thing that should not be: about ten feet long, short-winged, waddling on webbed feet. Insult and abuse and death -- he will snap his fingers under the nose of the outrageous thing. It will be worth a great deal to lead that by the nose and demonstrate that such things had been seen in the sky, though they had been supposed to be angels. It will be a great moment for somebody. He will come back to New York, and march up Broadway with his angel."

Carnival Saga -- Charles Fort's New Lands (Part Two)

(Note: The quotes below are from the Sacred Texts version of Charles Fort's New Lands. A link to the rights-free copy of the text is given below.

Charles Fort's New Lands)

In all of his books, Charles Fort is very thorough at listing all the scientific journals and newspapers, with issue numbers and dates, from which he has gleaned all of his information. I suppose it gives Fort's work a sense of authenticity, of verifiability. And the truth is -- it does give people the ability to verify what Fort is claiming. But at some times it does slow down the pace of the work a bit.

So I was pleasantly surprised when I read Fort saying, in his book New Lands, that he sometimes thinks he should just dispense with all the journal titles and dates and just start shouting forth his data in an almost poetic form, like a prophet would do. Fort says:

"If we could stop to sing, instead of everlastingly noting vol. this and p. that, we could have the material of sagas -- of the battlers in the sun, which may be neither intolerably hot nor too uncomfortably cold; and of the hermit who floats across the moor, of heroes and hairy monsters of the sky. I should stand in public places and sing our data -- sagas of parades and explorations and massacres in the sky -- having a busy band of accompanists, who set off fireworks, and send up balloons, and fire off explosives at regular intervals -- extra-geographic songs of boiling lakes and floating islands -- extra-sociologic meters that express the tramp of space-armies upon inter-planetary paths covered with little black pebbles -- biologic epics of the clouds of mammoths and horses and animals that once upon a time fell from the sky upon the northern coast of Siberia."

The truth is, this is Fort at his best. I can honestly say, I'm not sure what is trying to prove, by saying over and over and over again, that stones fell from the sky, or that there's a definite conjunction, in number upon number of instances, that lights in the sky precede crashing sounds in the sky, which in turn precede earthquake-like phenomena.

But one often feels that one has to wade through Fort's arguments against the scientists, as well as Fort's own quasi-scientific examinations of very similar events, just to get to the really good stuff.

Nevertheless, when one does get to the good stuff, it's really good.

Fort is an incredibly imaginative person. And I think part of the reason he ties himself down to the arguments he's constantly making against the scientists, as well as to the thorough documenting of his data sources -- in the actual body of his work! -- is that these things help him tie himself down a bit, give him a bit of ballast, so that he doesn't go floating away with his imagination.

But Fort does see that the imagination is a key factor in the progress of knowledge from the current system of exclusionism to a future system of inclusionism. A good instance of this is when Fort speaks of the anomalous lights that have been seen to shine in one of the moon's craters, Plato. Fort believes that these lights, along with other light-phenomena on both the moon and Mars, are the attempts of beings living on the moon and Mars to communicate with us.

Fort knows that there are plenty of records of the patterns of blinking these lights made during their periods of anomalous shining. The records are all stored away in libraries. And perhaps one day, a new researcher, with enough imagination, will go into those records and work out a new language -- the language of the Selenians or the Martians. Fort says:

"Perhaps there were definite messages of Morse-like code. There is a chance for the electricity in somebody's imagination to start crackling.

"A Champollion may some day decipher hieroglyphics that ma have been flashed from one world to another."

The idea itself is really lovely. But what I love most about it is Fort's phrase "the electricity in somebody's imagination." Fort had one of the most electric imaginations of all!

Fort's imagination does show, too, everywhere. He doesn't just imagine theories for the data he collects. He's always spinning a story onto the images the data calls up. For instance, this he at one point calls lights that had been seen in a lunar crater "events that seem to me to have been like carnivals upon the moon."

At one point in New Lands, Fort imagines himself, for a number of practical purposes as one of the Selenites, one of the beings who live on the moon. In one scene, he, as a Selenite, watches a battle in the U.S. Civil War, and imagines that the Selenites must have thought the great conflict was a matter of weather, rather than living beings slaughtering each other:

"Patched by a blue inundation that had never been seen before -- this earth, early in the 60's of the 19th century. Then faintly, from far away, this new appearance is seen to be enveloped with volumes of grey. Flashes like lightning, and faintest of rumbling sounds -- then cloud-like envelopments roll away, and a blue formation shines in the sun. Meteorologists upon the moon take notes."

Of course, it would seem like the fact that Selenites being able to see a battle of the Civil War well enough to watch the movements of the blue and the grey would imply that the moon is a lot closer to the earth than conventional scientists think it is. And Fort does think that the moon is a lot closer to the earth than conventional scientists think it is. Fort thinks all of the elements of our so-called universe, or, as Fort would term it, "our so-called solar system," are much closer to us than the conventional scientists say they are:

"There are data that indicate that objects have come to this earth from planets or from stars, enforcing our idea that the remotest planet is not so far from this earth, as the moon is said, conventionally, to be; and that the stars, all equidistant from this earth, may be reached by traveling from this earth."

Fort believes that the moon is a few hundred miles away from the earth. He gives arguments for this, such as earthshine, which is apparently a shining phenomenon the moon takes on by reflecting light from the earth. This is sometimes seen as a kind of halo around the moon.

Interestingly enough, Apollo 11 Command Module Pilot Michael Collins, in his book Carrying the Fire, which I posted about a while back, mentions earthshine. The earthshine description is one of the most beautiful passages in that book.

Fort believes that earthshine is indicative of the moon's proximity to the earth -- if the moon is so affected by the earth as to produce a phenomenon like earthshine, it must be close enough to be so affected.

But Fort also believes that light phenomena similar to the aurora borealis, which, apparently, have had their origins on earth, have also affected the moon, demonstrating the earth's proximity to the moon. Fort says that there is a record from 1847 that:

"large, luminous spots were seen upon the dark part of the moon, and a general glow upon the upper limb. ... The whole shaded part of the disc seemed to be a mixture of light and shades. Upon the night of the 19th, there was a similar appearance upon this earth, an aurora, according to the London newspapers. It looks as if both the moon and this earth were affected by the same illumination, said to have been auroral. I offer this occurrence as indication that the moon is nearby if the moon and earth could be so affected in common."

Fort also lists phenomena from 1883 and 1884 involving:

"Misty light-effects upon the dark part of the moon, not like 'earthshine.' Our expression is that so close is the moon to this earth that it, too, may be affected by phenomena in the atmosphere of this earth."

Fort also implies that Mars is also much closer to the earth than the conventional distance given to it by scientists. In fact, Fort says that there are times during the orbit of Mars when "sometimes does the planet Mars almost graze this earth."

Mars is also, Fort says, "an island with perhaps no more surface-area than has England, but likely enough inhabited, like England." The moon is also much smaller than conventional scientists say, proposes Fort. He says that the moon is perhaps about 100 miles in diameter.

But the whole of our so-called solar system is much smaller than conventional scientists say. Fort says that "the planets are circulating adjacencies," basically all swimming around near each other. And Mars isn't the only planet that could graze us. Fort says:

"Almost do we now conceive of a difficulty of the future as being not how to reach the planets, but how to dodge them."

While Fort believes that the other planets often swim around our so-called solar system, some in regular orbits, some in much more erratic orbits, he does believe the earth remains motionless. He even believes that the earth does not revolve on its axis. Both these forms of motionless make it easier for objects from other planets to approach our planet.

Fort argues that if we were orbiting the sun at nineteen miles per second, as the conventional scientists say we are, it would be nearly impossible for an object to approach and land on the planet:

"One repeating mystery -- the mystery of the local sky.

"How, if this earth be a moving earth, could anything sail to, fall to, or in any other way reach this earth, without being smashed into fine particles by the impact?"

So Fort argues that the earth is motionless. He also argues that there are portions of the atmosphere that are stabilized above certain portions of the earth. These portions of the earth are, thereby, particularly susceptible, it seems, to visitations from objects from other heavenly bodies.

The visitations to the places under these stabilized portions of atmosphere are in particular the ones that interest Fort. They all take a relatively similar pattern. There is a flash of light or a luminous body in the sky. The flash is followed by a concussion or other loud noise in the sky. The noise is then often followed by an earthquake. These three elements are the characteristic elements, though they may go through a number of variations.

Fort also seems to have found three cities, as well as one major region, on the earth where these phenomena repeatedly occur. The three cities are Irkustk, in Siberia; Comrie, in Scotland; and Birmingham, in England. There is also an entire triangle of phenomena in England, which Fort calls the London Triangle:

"It is pointed in the north by Worcester and Hereford, in the south by Reading, Berkshire, and in the east, by Colchester, Essex. The line between Colchster and Reading runs through London."

However, there are more visitations, which are more varied than the more general visitaions that Fort takes as his main template. I'm more interested in the variations, which are of a much brighter, more fiery, sometimes much more grotesque, nature.

In 1855, a woman in Comrie saw a luminous object fall to the earth. She went to where she saw it fall and picked up the object. But she dropped it immediately, because it was so hot. In 1868, two women, Fort reports, had been hit by stones which had apparently fallen from the sky. One of these women had her hand injured. The other had her head injured. It was guessed that boys must have been nearby to throw stones at the ladies. But the women insisted that this wasn't possible.

These last two instances are of interest to me, mainly because in Fort's previous book, Book of the Damned, though some of the data seemed to approach physical danger to the people involved in the events, it never got to that point. But here, in these two instances, we have two people being physically injured by the objects.

There's also a parallel, I believe, between being hit by a falling object from the sky (which could be conceived of as analogous to a star) and poetic inspiration. William Blake illustrates this idea in his poem Milton, where Milton himself, I believe, in the form of Blake's muse -- a male muse! -- descends to inspire Milton, by shooting, as a star, into Milton's foot!

I said in my previous posts on Book of the Damned that I see a lot of the imagery in Fort's work, even though it's based on hard data, could also be seen as something like "found footage," arranged in a narrative, which then expresses Charles Fort's own journey of psychological transformation.

In Book of the Damned, I saw the journey involving Fort first integrating his shadow side, or, one might say, evil or dark side, into his personality. But I saw the book ending with Fort's discovery of his connection to the collective unconscious, and his goal of integrating that element into his personality.

But what struck me more about that book was that every time Fort got close to seeing the aliens from these other planets or dimensions becoming embodied, he would immediately flee from that type of imagery. Then he would slowly work his way back to embodiment. But the last chapter of Book of the Damned was, in my opinion, a horrendous rejection of any of those beings ever being embodied. I hoped that Fort would allow the beings to become embodied in this next book. And he did, as we'll soon see.

But first, I believe, Fort had to let a human being be injured. So the two women of the instances above were the sacrificial victims. They had to be injured by stones that weren't thrown but seemed to be thrown, because those stones could, then, easily be mistaken, not just for stones thrown by boys, but stones thrown by poltergeists.

Fort, at least up through this point in his psychological development, has a huge problem accepting poltergeists. I think this is because poltergeists symbolize a "force" of human nature, and Fort, being the extremely spiritually sensitive person he is, shies away from human "force" in general.

So after these two women become Fort's sacrificial victims, Fort has another instance of a falling body from the sky. This time, a seventeen year old boy is out one night in 1857, when he sees a luminous body fall from the sky:

"A young man of seventeen... saw a fiery red ball, the size and shape of an orange, strike a fence, breaking and disappearing. Where this object had struck the fence, was found a 'small bristling mass of black fibres.' ... 'A confused aggregate of short clippings of the finest black hair, varying in length from one-tenth to one-third of an inch.'"

These images are similar to bodies that one astronomer saw passing through the sky in 1853. These object were, according to the astronomer watching them, apparently above the height of the clouds that were in the sky at that time. These bodies strike me, from my understanding of Fort's quote from the astronomer, as something like a school of gigantic, glowing, hairy, floating creatures. Fort quotes the astonomer:

"'All of them seemed to have hairy appendages, and in many cases a distinct tail followed the objects and was highly luminous.'"

Fort's discussion of embodied aliens begins with a description of phantom figures floating through the air, as if hanging from cords and floating through the air. The figures were apparently glowing bright white, and making a moaning noise:

"It is said that at Warwick, C.W., Oct. 3, 1843, somebody named Charles Cooper heard a rumbling sound in the sky, and saw a cloud, under which were three human forms, 'perfectly white,' sailing through the air above him, not higher than the tree-tops. It is said that the beings were angels. ... An interesting observation is that they seemed to have belts around their bodies -- as if they had been let down from a vessel above, though this notion is not suggested in the pamphlet. They 'moaned.'"

Fort's next view of phantoms is of a group of phantom soldiers seen upon a mountain, from another mountain, by another group of soldiers. The leader of the non-phantom soldiers recognized the phantom soldiers as reflections, or "mirages," of a company he knew.

The leader knew that the General who led the company of which this phantom troupe was a mirage had very recently died. The General assumed that this mirage was actually some real visual effect from the soldiers actually marching to their general's funeral. But, several days after the General's funeral, the phantom soldiers were seen marching again. The leader of the non-phantom company said the same thing he'd said several days later, although the same funeral couldn't possibly have happened twice!

These phantom figures are about as close as Fort can get to the idea of embodied aliens for the time being. He has to back away a bit, to get himself a bit removed from the human "force" of embodied beings. But Fort continues to see these phantoms in the sky, through the data he collects together in his narrative style.

Fort's next piece of data is that in 1846, resident of the city of Edinburgh actually saw a phantom version of the city of Liverpool in the skies above them! Fort says: "This 'identification' seems to have been the product of suggestion: at the time a panorama of Edinburgh was upon exhibition in Liverpool.

Fort gives another instance of a town seen in the sky, in 1847. He then gives an instance, from 1848, from Scotland:

"The sky turned dark. It seemed to open. The opening looked reddish, and in the reddish area, appeared a regiment of soldiers. Then came appearances that looked like war vessels under full sail, then 'a man and a woman and a swan and a peahen.' The 'opening' closed, and that was the last of this shocking or ridiculous mixture that nobody but myself would record as being worth thinking about."

Fort revolves away from the figures of towns and people in the skies for a few chapters -- again, I would believe, because he feels to overpowered by their human "force." But he does return to them, first with an explanation of what he thinks they are.

Fort argues that these phantoms are not ghosts or spirits, like psychic researchers might say. I think Fort's resistance against the psychic researchers is directly due to his fear of human "force" in this case.

But Fort says that these phantoms are actual beings from other planets. When Fort first mentions these beings, he says that when they make their presence known on earth, we can only understand them in terms of the appearances of something we've already seen on earth. We allow our perception to echo things we've seen before onto what we're seeing now. Fort says:

"Perhaps they were revelations of, or mirages from, unknown regions of outer space, and spectacles of relatively nearby inhabited lands, and of space-travelers, but that all reports upon them were products of the assimilarting of the unknown with figures and figments of the nearest familiar similarities."

But re-approaching the subject, Fort seems to imply that we can actually see these mirage-like phenomena as echoes of things we haven't seen before, but as echoes of things that have been seen before by other beings on other planets:

"Our acceptance is that every mirage has a primary; that in human mind all poetry is based upon observation, and that imagery in the sky is similarly uncreative. If a mirage cannot be traced to the known upon this earth, one supposes that it is either a derivation from the unknown upon this earth, or from the unknown somewhere else."

But, not very much father along, Fort again assumes that these phenomena were a composite of the actual image of the object in the sky and images that would be familiar to the people seeing them:

"The suggestion in my own mind is that these were not mirages from terrestrial primaries, ... but were shadows or mirages from something that was in temporary suspension, ... all details distorted and reported in terms of familiar terrestrial appearances."

Fort then gives a number of wonderful descriptions of towns or other imagery seen in the sky. He states how in 1881, in Pomerania:

"The mirage of a village had been seen: snow-covered roofs from which hung icicles; human forms distinctly visible. It was believed that the mirage was a representation of the town of Nexo."

In 1882, in Lake Orsa, Sweden, images of steamships and islands covered with vegetation. In 1883, in Sweden, was a mirage in the sky that changed from mountains to lakes and farms. Another mirage, in 1885, showed two islands and two warships. Another changing scene in 1885 showed a whale, a crocodile, forests, dancers, an island, and a park.

"Super-Uterine Entombment" -- Charles Fort's New Lands (Part One)

(NOTE: The quotes below are from the Sacred Texts version of Charles Fort's New Lands. A rights-free copy of this text can be found at the link below:

Charles Fort's New Lands)

Before I begin this post, I'd like to tell the regular readers of this blog that, starting with today's post, I am going to work with a newer, more blog-like strategy.

From here on out, I'm going to do my best to do one post a day. This means that the blog posts will likely be smaller. But they will also come out with greater regularity. I know that the few readers I have are kind enough to check in every day. So I'd like you to have something to find when you do check in.

Also -- I find that, with writers I really love, such as Abraham Cowley (the subject of my last post) and Charles Fort (the subject of this post), I suffer from a syndrome a little bit similar to what the great photographer Diane Arbus has mentioned.

Arbus said that everywhere she went, everything she did, she felt like she had to memorize every image she saw. It finally got to a point where she was holding so many images in her head that she just had a nervous breakdown.

After Arbus had her nervous breakdown, she snapped out of that obsessive-compulsive mindset and let herself relax with her mental recording of imagery.

In my note-taking habits, I personally think of myself as a scribe rather than a reader. But -- you should see my notebook! -- for the Cowley essay, I seriously took 65 pages of notes! The darn poem cycle, including Cowley's notes, is only 110 pages long! But I wanted to write down every single image from Cowley that I thought was good.

So, while I still intend to be philosophical -- or, rather parasophical -- in my writings, and while I will definitely give you guys all copious quotes from the texts, when I read from rights-free texts, I also intend to give smaller, more frequent entries, and to be a little more relaxed with myself in my actual style of studying for these posts.

HOWEVER -- I would also like to say -- that if you guys would rather I kept doing things the way I'm doing them now, instead of changing, just drop me a line and let me know. I'd like this blog to be as enjoyable for you as possible.

That being said, let's get started with Charles Fort.

*****

Like I said in my previous text on Abraham Cowley, being an adult baby, I always keep an eye out in the things I read and the art I experience, for things relating to babyhood, infancy, or adult babyhood, to kind of stock up my imagination. And Charles Fort didn't disappoint!

In fact, the first part of New Lands ends with Fort's proposition that what we think of as the solar system -- or, actually, what we think of as the entire universe -- is really just a shell in which we are currently developing, as an embryo would develop inside of a womb.

We'll eventually spring forth from the womb. But before we do, we, and our scientific ideas, will continue to grow and change. And, as our ideas change, perhaps even the universe around us will change, as the body of an embryo develops into the body of a baby. Fort calls this idea "super-embryology," and he describes our existence at one point as a "super-uterine entombment." Fort says:

"That, if shelled away from external light and life, [our so-called solar system] is so surrounded and protected in the same cause and functioning as that of similarly encompassed forms subsidiary to it -- that our existence is super-embryonic."

And:

"That all organizations of thought must be baseless in themselves, and of course be not final, or they could not change, and must bear within themselves those elements that will, in time, destroy them -- that seeming solidities that pass away, in phantom-successions, are functionaries relatively to their periods, and express the passage from phase to phase of all things embryonic."

This idea struck me -- the sense that we're all little babies, even us adults, regardless of whether we think of ourselves as adult babies or just as regular, old adults. But what also struck me about what Fort said was its similarity to what I'd just finished reading in Cowley: the idea of a universe as a womb, in which are held the future years:

"There into the close Nests of Time dost peep,
And there with piercing Eye,
through the firm Shell, and the thick White dost spy,
Years to come a-forming lie,
Close in their sacred Secondine asleep,
'Till hatched by the Sun's vital Heat,
Which o'er them yet does brooding set,
Thy Life and Motion get,
And ripe at last, with vigorous Might,
Break through the Shell, and take their everlasting Flight."

Cowley's poetry is, of course, full of visceral and womb-like imagery. And it seems that one of Cowley's own personal fantasies -- shared with the fantasies of adult babies -- is to be re-born, to be back in the womb and re-born; although in Cowley, this desire for rebirth is also tempered with a desire for a complete bodily death, and a life in spirit only. But this seems to be the same development as Fort makes, though Fort expresses it in a less anthropomorphic, more cosmological way.

What's also interesting to me about this idea is that Fort, carrying the ideas of embryology outward into the cosmos, also claims that our developments are step by step, phase by phase, just like they are in the development of an animal embryo:

"The essential process of embryonic growth, by which the same protoplasmic substance responds differently and in different phases."

Now, I hate to make arguments by analogy with Fort, because his system seems to be so entirely his own that I don't want to intrude on it with stuff that he might personally think of as being too conventionally-based.

But it does seem to me that if, as Fort says, our ideas, just like our physical surroundings, are developing through a process similar to that of embryos, could we apply what we propose about embryology to what we might propose about our ideas and our physical surroundings?

The main idea I'm thinking of right now is the idea people have been saying for a long time now, really even since before the days of Charles Fort, that an embryo's development is a kind of tracing of the evolution of life on earth, all the way up to the point of the evolution of human beings. So, in other words, we begin as cells, develop into more complex beings, take on elements common to fish, then amphibians, etc., until we, as fetuses, develop our more specifically mammalian characteristics.

William S. Beck, whose book Modern Science and the Nature of Life I wrote a post on a few days ago, says that modern embryologists actually believe that the embryo doesn't develop characteristics of full-grown fish, frogs, etc., but that it develops the characteristics of embryological fish, frogs, etc. So that what we're seeing in the development of an embryo isn't the development of the history of life, but the development of the history of embryological life.

If we would be able to apply this same thought to Fort's thought that our universe is just some kind of super-uterus, in which we adults are all a bunch of adult babies, would it be possible to say that if we were to trace the history of our ideas, we would also be able to trace the embryological ideas -- not the full-grown ideas, but the fetal ideas -- of the existence that is external to this super-uterus?

I'll let that idea stew for a while. I don't have an answer to it. And I'm not sure if it's worth having an answer for, anyway.

Earlier on, Fort gives another illustration of his ideas that makes the adult baby in me happy. Fort implies that, in future generations, the idea of the speed of light will be taught to little children as something of a nursery rhyme, in the same way that nowadays children are taught the nursery rhyme of "Little Bo Peep."

Again, this puts the image in my head that right now, even those of us who think of ourselves as the adults of the adults, the scientists, are, in fact, nothing more than adult babies, reading nursery stories to themselves in the gigantic nurseries that peoople call laboratories, offices, and convention halls. Fort says:

"Sometimes I'm in a more sentimental mood. I think that the pretty story of the velocity of light, and its 'determination,' will some day be of legitimate service: be rhymed some day, and told to children, in future kindergartens, replacing the story of litte Bopeep, with the tale of a planet that lost its satellites and sometimes didn't know where to find them, but that good magicians came along and formultated them the indeterminable."

As you can probably tell from the quote above, Fort has a bone to pick with the scientific habit of "determination." Fort's attack on determination, interestingly, gives the first part of this book a strength of focus that Book of the Damned did not have.

If my dear readers are readers, in general, of the literature of psychic research, they'll know that one of the things that psychic researchers are always doing is trying to justify themselves to the scientific world. They do this in two ways -- first, by making incredibly stringent conditions for the experiments they conduct; and, second, by making the argument of the history of science itself.

The Society for Psychical Research (SPR) was the first organization to make such an effort at scientific restrictions on parapsychological experiments. Later on J.B. Rhine perfected the scientific methods of pyschical research at Duke University, into the card experiments we all know so well, thanks to that opening scene in Ghostbusters. After J.B. Rhine, Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff, and then Dean Radin, brought new technological methods into research, as well as expanding their researches into things like remote viewing.

The argument of all these researchers was that they had to prove their findings by putting the strictes of controls on them, so that nothing could get into the experiment that would convince the scientific world that the experiments weren't really proving the existence of psychic phenomena.

The only problem was -- the scientific community didn't, and, to a large extent, still doesn't, listen or care!

The second approach these scientists use, though, is the more humorous of these approaches. Psychic researchers always try to show that the history of science is filled with great minds who have tried to prove to the world that something about the universe is true, which the conventional thinkers of their time thought was false. But, the psychical researchers claim, through the exactitude of their calculations and the continued belief in their findings, they eventually convince the world.

The argument, in this case, would be that the world of psychic research would do the same thing. So, if scientists would just pay attention to the history of science and be smart, they'd accept the copious findings of psychic research right now.

The only problem is -- the scientific community, to a large extent, doesn't care!

Nevertheless, since the days of the SPR, psychic researchers have been trying to convince scientists of the validity of their findings by using scientific methods as a basis. And they've been ignored.

Fort's argument, after, mind you, much of his own rigorous, personal research, was that science wasn't as exact as it liked to pretend to be, and that most of science's findings were accidental -- the result either of dumb luck, or of having their senses in the right place at the right time. Fort says:

"That there is no such mathematics, in the face of any number of learned treatises, is far more strikingly betrayed by those shining little misfortunes, the satellites of Jupiter. Satellite after satellite was discovered, by accident or by observation, and not once by calcluation."

Fort has a particularly dull axe to grind with the astronomers, who, Fort claims, are the most pompous of all the scientists, a group of people who employ, as far as the laymen know, the laws of the Infinitesimal Calculus, of Kepler's Laws, and the more modern mathematics that have led to the Theory of Relativity, the most abstract of mathematics, to understand the most distant of objects. They seem think of themselves, Fort says, as an intellectual aristocracy.

Fort does, in fact, give an account of one astronomer who thought of his colleagues in this way. Fort says:

"There never has been an astronomic discovery other than the observational or the accidental."

And:

"As to astronomers who calculate positions of planets -- of whom he was one -- Newcomb, in Reminiscences of an Astronomer, says -- 'The men who have done it are therefore, in intellect, the select few of the human race -- an aristocracy above all others in the scale of being.'"

It seems to me that the attempts of psychic researchers to meet on common ground with people who, in physics or astronomy or what have you, will think of themselves as "above all others," are really fruitless efforts.

Fort seems to believe that the goal of someone who is trying to bring a new understanding of the universe can't act with the ideology of the scientist, but must act using the tools which have really furthered science to begin with -- accident and observation.

Except that Fort, having done a lot of looking into the exploits of the scientists, found that they weren't very exact in their measurements, after all. The deductive systems that the scientists formulated, Fort argues, haven't discovered anything, or made any occurrences in the universe very exactly predictable at all.

Fort gives example after example of this: meteor showers that never re-appeare; comets that were calculated to be receding, then approaching, then receding, then approaching. Certain technology judges, Fort shows us, a celestial body as a star, then a nebula, then a star, then a nebula. Stars are found and lost. Fort even argues that both Uranus and Neptune were found by accident, then went down in the history books as having been found by very careful calculations.

However, the most delightful example I found of the incosistency of scientific calculations and technology, was the statement that one scientist made, getting himself in a lot of trouble afterwards, that one of the most revered books of astronomical formulation of his time was crammed full of glaring errors. Fort tells us the story of how one scientist, a Dr. Sadler, advised another scientist, a Dr. Williams:

"not to use the new edition of Smyth's Cycle, because... 'a more disgracefully inaccurate catalog of double stars had never been published.'

"'If,' says one astronomer to the other astronomer, 'you have a copy of this miserable production, sell it for waste paper. It is crammed with the most stupid errors.'"

This is in particular very interesting to me, after having read The Double Helix, by James D. Watson. There is a story in that book where Watson, having made a series of calculations about the structure of DNA, using a textbook of supposedly accepted, supposedly correct, biochemical data, was then told by a biochemist that the work, even though it was accepted everywhere, was full of errors, and that everybody in the know knew it was full of errors. So Waston's little story -- as well as his overall story -- seems to back up what Fort claims.

Fort shows us how Copernicus' theory of orbital and axial motions could only be based on three scientific methods, which weren't around in Copernicus' day: aberrations of light; parallax, and spectroscopy. Copernicus, it appears, based his theories on the idea that the earth must be spherical, because perfect bodies, like a water drop, are spherical. Copernicus then worked his theory forward from there.

But Fort also shows us that aberrations of light, parallax, and spectroscopy are themselves suject to various kinds of error. And, even if the calculations from these methods were always exact, they wouldn't exactly provde that our universe works according to the scientific conception of it:

"Astronomers now admit, or state, that the shift of spectral lines, which they say indicates that the earth moves around the sun, also indicates any other of three other circumstances, or sets of circumstances."

Fort argues that the calculations that have lead people to believe that our very solar system operates the way it does, are "elaborate structures that are pretensions without foundation."

And, in an argument, which I think is even more central to Fort's philosophy of inclusionism, as set apart from what Fort believes is the exclusivity of science, Fort says:

"Right at the heart of our opposition, and right at the heart of our own expressions, is the fatality that there is no reasoining, no logic, no explanation resembling the illusions in the vainglories of common suppositions. There is only the process of correlationg to, or organizing and systematizing around, something that is arbitrarily taken for a base, or a dominant doctrine, or a major premise -- the process of assimilating with something else, making agreement with something else, or interpreting in terms of something else, which supposed base is never itself final, but was originally an assimilation with still something else."

Fort believes that one of the great arguments of science, that the laws of astronomy and physics are in almost perfect agreement, is nothing more than "a tainted agreement between the physicists and the astronomers," and "the reekings of two consistent stenches." Fort further says, regarding the developments of astronomy and physics:

"Our expression is that these developments had their origin in conspiracy and prostitution, if one has a fancy for such accusations; or, if everybody else has been so agreeable, we think so more amiably ourselves, that it was all a matter of comfortably adjusing and being obliging all around."

Fort states that this conspiracy of scientific data has, at it's base, the maintenance of scientific profesionals' profits. He gives his definition of what he calls "the squirm":

"To lose all sense of decency and value of data, but to be agreeable; but to be like everybody else, and intend to turn our agreeableness to profit."

And, again, in disproving the findings of spectroscopic astronomy, Fort points out that the insistence on the infallibility of the spectroscope might also be profit-driven:

"The whole subject of spectroscopy in astronomy has been cast into rout and disgrace, of course only to ourselves, and not in the view of manufacturers of spectroscopes, for instance."

Fort insists that, really, the only way to understand the ideas of scientists is to be hypnotized into believing what they say.

"It is supposed that astronomic subjects and principles and methods cannot be understood by the layman. I think this myself. ... Of course they cannot be understood by the unhypnotized."

And, Fort claims, it is actually the scientists' intention not to be understood. This, Fort says, is the reason why the scientists have made such grand claims about the size of our universe, making things billions of miles away from each other, using calculations which, Fort believes, might just as easily be used to argue that things aren't more than thousands of miles away from each other.

"The meaning I read in the whole subject is that, in this Dark Age we're living in, not even such rudimentary matters as the shape of this earth have ever been investigated except now and then to support somebody's theory, because astronomers have instinctively preferred the remote and the not-so-easily understandable and the safe from external inquiry."

So, using these arguments against science, in order to grant himself a bit of independence, Fort gives us the first elements of his "Neo-Astronomy."

"This supposed solar system -- an egg-like organism that is shelled away from external light and life -- this central and stationary earth its nucleus -- around it is a revolving shell, in which the stars are pores, or functioning channels, through some of which spray irradiating formations said to be 'meteoritic,' but perhaps electric -- in which the nebulae are translucent patches, and in which the many dark parts are areas of opaque, structural substance -- and that the stars are not trillions nor even millions of miles away -- with proportional reductions of all internal distances, so that the planets are not millions, nor even hundreds of thousands of miles away."

Fort then gives us the description of the "super-embryonic" solar system which I gave at the beginning of this post. And having given that explanation, Fort now prepares us readers for the second part of this book, which are the actual phenomena observed by people throughout time, which Fort takes as evidence for our existence in this "super-uterine entombment."

"We have reached our catalogue of the sights and sounds to which all that we have so far considered is merely introductory. For them there are either no conventional explanations or poor insufficiencies half-heartedly offered. Our data are glimpses of an epoch that is approaching with far-away explosions. It is vibrating on its edges with the tread of distant space-armies. Already it has pictured in the sky visions that signify new excitements, even now lapping over into the affairs of a self-disgusted, played-out hermitage."

Seeing through Evil Eyes -- Book of the Damned (Part Two)

(All quotes in this post come from the edition of Book of the Damned on the Project Gutenberg website. This edition is available for free at the link below.

Book of the Damned)

In Charles Fort's expression of a quasi-existent world, there are three kinds of evil. One kind of evil is the things that have been good becoming too old for their time. Another kind of evil is the future good, which is not quite yet ready to be accepted as the good. As Fort says:

"Evil is outlived virtue, or incipient virtue that has not yet established itself, or any other phenomena that is not seeming adjustment, harmony, consistency, with a dominant."

Fort's third description of evil is simply being the use by things of other things for which the first things are useful.

Fort's third description is made in direct reference to the extra-terrestrial beings for whom Fort believes we are property.

This third description of evil is, of course, only evil for the things that are being made use of. In other words, Fort believes that we would see the aliens who "own" us as evil simply because they think of us as their property.

Fort's Book of the Damned is famous for his quote, "I think we're property."

Fort's opinion in this matter is quite serious, and his evidence for anomalous phenomena occurring throughout human history is all directed to point to this expression of his.

Fort doesn't believe things. He "accepts" them. This is a hard thing to remember, as I type.

Fort "accepts" that earth used to be a No-man's land, fought over by beings from a number of different planets. But one alien race has managed to gain control of the planet from other alien races. That alien race fends off all other beings from our planet and has complete control over us.

Fort also accepts that there is a group of human beings that has had contact with this alien race for a long time. He first mentions this group as a "secret society," that chilling phrase of modern history, made even more spine tingling by contemporary conspiracy. Fort hypothesizes that for every anomalous phenomenon reported, one might be able to trace an investigator to the area.

"But," Fort asks, "what if (this investigator) had no anthropological, lapiderian, or meteorological affiliations -- but did belong to a secret society -- It is only a dawning credibility."

Fort later hypotesizes that this secret society might be akin to a cult, guiding humanity through various stages of development.

"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 accordance with instructions received -- from Somewhere else -- in our mysterious usefulness."

Fort has devised this idea, as he says, from the evidence he's found of anomalous phenomena. He has, he tells us again and again, compiled a mass of data. Accumulation of data, in Fort's expression, brings things from a phantomic or ghostly state into a state of substantiality. So as evidence piles up, the phenomena behind the evidence become less deniable and more substantial.

But as Fort compiles more and more data, he seems to have more and more ideas about what kind of existence this data justifies.

I'm about two-thirds of the way through this book. I'm actually surprised that I'm only this far along. I feel like I've studied my brains out. It's not a big book, and it's actually a lot of fun to read. But I feel like I've read a lot and hardly gotten anywhere.

Anyway, I'm about two-thirds of the way through this book, and already I've encountered the following planets:

Super-Romanimus -- The planet from which all the Romans came.

Super-Israelimus -- The planet from which all the Israelites came.

Azuria -- The planet from which all the Britains came. Azuria, actually, is a planet of blue people. The first Britains were actually blue -- they didn't paint themselves blue. Later on, the humanized Azurians no longer wanted the space-dwelling Azurians controlling them. So the Azurians left the planet. But before they left, they sent down huge rays of electricity to the earth, literally vitrifying a number of stone forts surrounding (but not in) England.

Monstrator -- A gigantic, spindle-shaped planet that has been seen on a number of occasions floating before the sun.

Melanicus -- Not really a planet at all, but a bat-shaped ship -- or a bat-shaped alien -- with wings hundreds of miles long. Actually, Fort's descriptions of Melanicus are so beautiful, I'll quote them:

"Vast dark thing with the wings of a super-bat, or jet-black super-construction; most likely one of the spores of the Evil One.

Fort clarifies the third conception of evil in this second quote on Melanicus:

"That upon the wings of a super-bat, (Melanicus) broods over this earth and over other worlds, perhaps deriving something from them: hovers on wings, or wing-like appendages, or planes that are hundreds of miles from tip to tip -- a super-evil thing that is exploiting us. By Evil I mean that which makes us useful. He obscures a star. He shoves a comet. I think he's a vast, black, brooding vampire."

Vulcan -- which is not a planet at all, but rather a whole bunch of objects which have passed between Mercury and the sun. But many astronomers, including one names Leverrier, have claimed these multiple phenomena to be one planet.

Fort claims that Leverrier believed in these phenomena being one planet so much that, when it was finally proved not to be so, he died. Fort says this was a "translation to the Positive Absolute," a kind of apotheosis a thing in the Fortean realm of quasi-existence (the plane on which we live) can experience when it holds so steadfastly to the things it identifies with that even total prove of its incongruity with reality will not shake its belief.

Incidentally, Fort also expresses that the stars in the sky are fixed, not moving. He says, as well, that stars are something like the souls of entities (human or otherwise) which have translated to the Positive Absolute. Fort says:

"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."

One super-celestial entity Fort does not mention in the cosmogoria above is the Super-Sargasso Sea, the vast, formless region in which sits the world of the Genesistrine, from which elements of our earth have been deposited, via sky-borne gelatinous regions, in free-fall.

These worlds seem to keep multiplying themselves. It's an incredible feat. And there's never a minute where I, as a reader, get bored with the experience. And I love all the data. But it seems so overwhelming that, as a new piece of data arises, Fort seems to invent a whole new story around it.

Fort claims to systematize. He even says that he's guilty of excluding, just as much as any of the scientists he berates are. But his universe just keeps on expanding. If a stone falls to the earth -- a new planet appears in Charles Fort's heaven!

I think there's an interesting quote of Fort's that connects both his tendency to multiply worlds and his belief in some kind of conspiracy theory involving humans and aliens:

"Unfortunately for myself, I look out widely but amorphously, indefinitely and heterogeneously. If I say I conceive of another world that is now in secret communication with certain esoteric inhabitants of this earth, I say I conceive of still other worlds that are trying to establish communications with all the inhabitants of this earth. I fit my notions to the data I find."

Fort has plenty of data. And plenty of notions.

But -- in spite of the fact that Fort says he looks out widely but amorphously, indefinitely and heterogeneously, there really is one point where his already bloating fantasy literally fragments. Fort himself commits an act of psycho-tropism, a mental "turning-away" from a subject matter. And not long after he does this, an image occurs in his work, which, although it is an objective piece of evidence, is truly an act of fragmentation.

This is the point where Fort speaks about poltergeists. He -- I should say -- barely speaks about poltergeists: only long enough to reject them.

However, for all the times he -- convincingly! -- shows how the rejections by conventional scientists of the reports of anomalous events are really only flimsy rejections, Fort manages to put up only a flimsy series of rejections against reports of poltergeists.

Fort gives two instances of all the windows of one or two houses being broken: one incident in Bermondsey in 1872, and one in Chiswick in 1841. In both of these incidents, people seem to have been puzzled as to where the stones could have come from. But Fort claims that the stones came from above.

This seems possible to me -- that the stones could have fallen from above. But to fly through windows, and at such an angle that they'd break furniture and even injure people inside the house -- seems like the stones would have to be coming from a much more horizontal than vertical angle.

Fort gives a few different types of conventional-scientific resistances to anomalous trauma, as one might think of it:

1. The thing was always there
2. The thing was swept up in a whirlwind and dropped down somewhere else
3. Complete disregard
4. Fraud
5. Identification with something else (without explaining how something else got there)
6. Amnesia

I would put Fort's resistance to this idea of poltergeists as a kind of counterpart to his second type of resistance. Fort says that if a bunch of stones come from somewhere, they have to come from the sky. They can't possibly have been thrown vertically by, say, poltergeists.

Fort admits that he's excluding, just as a scientist would, in this case. He claims, not long after rejecting poltergeists:

"I have always been in sympathy with the dogmatists and exclusionists: to seem to be is falsely and arbitrarily and dogmatically to exclude."

He then claims that he's rejecting poltergeists because he doesn't want the theories of his cosmology to burgeon into an unsustainable mass of concepts.

"So that this book shall approximate to form, or that our data shall approximate to organization, or that we shall approximate to intelligibility, we have to call ourselves back constantly from wandering off into infinitude."

However, I find it kind of interesting that Fort, right after rejecting the idea of poltergeists throwing rocks through windows, then goes on to rather drastically alter (in my opinion) his theory regarding the gelatinous areas in the sky -- these areas suddenly become vast icy areas in the sky.

Not only do these areas in the sky suddenly become vast icy areas instead of vast gelatinous areas -- but the earth itself becomes flat! The universe itself becomes flat. Fort says there may come a day when people will simply walk to Mars or Jupiter. Fort also envisions a future for aviators, where, at a certain altitude, they'll park their vehicles in something like a winter wonderland:

"Aviators of the future. They fly up and up. Then they get out and walk. The fishing's good: the bait's right there. They find messages from other worlds -- and within three weeks there's a big trade worked up in forged messages."

Not long after this, Fort says:

"We begin to suspect that this is not so much a book we're writing as a sanitarium for overworked coincidences."

But -- his coincidences, the ones that make his theories -- or the coincidences that the scientists are using to reject the evidence of anomalous phenomena?

What I find more interesting about the "Aviators of the future" quote is that Fort says mentions "forged messages," as if that's a big joke -- that the first thing aviators would be doing would be forging and selling messages after seeing how much demand there was for the actual messages.

This is interesting to me because in one of the sections preceding this one, Fort's topic of investigation was evidence of stones, wedges, other shaped objects, coins, and stone tablets -- all inscribed with characters that appeared to be letters. Fort asserted that these items were objects that had fallen to earth or been left on earth by alien races. But, largely, these items were alleged to be communications, either between aliens and earthlings or aliens and aliens on earth.

After this section, Fort gives a very clear description of Intermediateness, and the reasons that people have for resisting new phenomena in our current state of quasi-existence:

"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."

This section moves into a section of evidence relating to the visitation and even population of this earth by giants (or large beings) and fairies (or small beings). Two examples of fairies were extremely interesting to me. One was the phenomenon of "fairy crosses," or formations, in different parts of the world, of small cemetery-like areas of crosses. Another was a cave in Edinburgh, where in 1836, two boys found seventeen very small coffins, with wooden dolls inside.

This section is now followed by another philosophical statement by Fort on how Intermediateness attempts to reach Universal Reality -- or translation to the Positive Absolute -- or Localization of the Universal -- through the two processes of attraction and repulsion.

"'Everything' in Intermediateness is not a thing, but is an endeavor to become something -- by breaking away from its continuity, or merging away with all other phenomena -- is an attempt to break away from the very essence of a relative existence and become absolute -- if have not surrendered to, or become part of, some higher attempt:

"To this process there are two aspects: -- Attraction, or the spirit of everything to assimilate all other things -- if it have not given in and subordinated to -- or have not been assimilated by -- some higher attempted system, unity, entity, harmony, equilibrium -- and -- Repulsion, or the attempt of everything to disregard or exclude the unassimilable."

In other words, Fort, coming into the section where he rejects poltergeists, basically equates the process of individuation from the Absolute with the scientific processes of skepticism. But, in the first third of this book, Fort has equated the process of individuation from the Absolute with "abrupt transitions" from Nature, which assert their Positiveness in this world by defying the very systems wishing to defy their existence.

So -- Fort rejects the poltergeist explanation of the evidence of thrown stones. And, suddenly, the gelatinous areas in the sky become watery areas. The gelatinous areas seem to disappear.

Not long after this, Fort compares current scientific theories to "rag dolls that keep infants occupied and noiseless." He says there's nothing wrong with this. But the problem occurs at "the arrival of rag dolls into maturity."

This idea of rag dolls growing into maturity reminds me of the miniature coffins found by the two boys in Edinburgh. There were wooden dolls inside those coffins. Those dolls, though not rag dolls, hadn't just grown into maturity: they'd grown into old age and death.

But, in the normal course of life, I don't think society would be affected one way or another if a rag doll grew into maturity. In fact -- I think, for some people, rag dolls do grow into maturity. What would be of more harm (in some people's minds -- certainly not mine!) would be if the infant didn't grow out of its infancy. If the rag doll grew while the infant did not.

I think this is the image Fort has, while his metaphor disguises this image for him. Remember that, after he mentions the inscribed stones and coins, he speaks about a new consciousness being "pre-natal" in humanity.

Right after this consciousness is "pre-natal," it becomes composed of races of giants and fairies. Right after these alien beings, who, as far as I can tell, were completely missing, un-present from the earth, being sending writings -- actual writings -- though completely indecipherable -- to Fort's planet, they suddenly appear. But they appear as fairies and giants!

Fort is suddenly unable -- it seems to me -- and I don't know anything about Charles Fort -- so I'm not saying this is a knowledgeable theory -- to deal with actually having beings on this imagined planet of his.

So Fort, through his narrative-manipulation of the data -- causes the beings to disappear. Before he causes them to disappear, he chants a magico-philosophical spell at the giants and narratives: he excludes them, by empowering the scientific dogma for his own purposes. He removes the law of "abrupt transition" from the process of the Absolute becoming the Individual -- and he replaces it with Attraction and Repulsion -- under which fall all the processes of conventional-scientific resistance he'd previously mentioned.

But -- then -- once he has caused his giants and fairies to disappear (I suppose that would be a psycho-tropism), he is left with psychic force in this world of his -- this world of his is this world of his data. And this psychic force still has some sort of humanoid characteristics. But it doesn't have a form. It's invisible again. It's a poltergeist.

But as soon as it acts -- through the data -- Fort has to bind it. The stones can't have been thrown by a poltergeist. They had to have been dropped from the anti-gravity areas in the sky. And so -- the psychic force that began in the sky -- in Fort's description of his world to us -- through his narrative-manipulation of these genuine relations of anomalous experience -- has gone back to the sky.

I think there is a process here. Fort spent quite some time in his book talking about things dropping to the earth. In fact, after he'd gone through his relation of all the natural phenomena falling to earth from this Genesistrine region, through the anti-gravity gelatinous regions of the sky, he suddenly starts giving us evidence of stone objects like rudimentary artifacts falling to the earth.

Then these artifacts start being inscribed with things. But -- suddenly -- Fort's evidence starts finding things buried in the earth. Instead of things falling to the earth, Fort's evidence starts showing up as things -- things of a higher level development, by the way, things like nails, masks, and so forth -- being found buried in the earth.

There is a psychic development here. Objects from the unconscious couldn't reach Fort from the earth -- because he had such a resistance to the earth. But after so much "communication" from the earth, Fort was finally able to start finding objects buried in the earth. The objects themselves moved from being natural objects, vegetation, animals, or refuse, to suddenly being rudimentary artifacts. Then, more developed artifacts were coming up from the earth.

Finally the objects really began communicating with Fort, through the inscribed objects. But the objects led to actually embodied presences of giants and fairies -- or at least their implication. In fact, there was only the idea that these giants and fairies existed.

In the second third of this book, the closest I got to seeing the giants was -- giant bones in the American Museum of Natural History, which Fort says "have been reconstructed into terrifying but 'proper' dinosaurs."

In the second third of this book, the closest I got to seeing the fairies was -- the fairy coffins the boys found in Edinburgh.

So -- Fort, through his narrative-manipulation of the genuine evidence, still didn't even allow these primordially humanoid psychic forces to be completely embodied before he once again banished them to invisibility.

Although it's interesting to note that the fairy-doll still survives in metaphorical form -- threatening to grow up into a "mature" rag-doll, while Fort's side of the metaphor apparently still remains a little baby. (Again -- I don't have any problem with remaining a little baby. I think it's terrific.)

Now Fort has banished his psychic forces from embodiment. He then banishes them from having even the human force of poltergeists.

What's the first thing that happens? The gelatinous region in the sky turns into water. It then stops sending down human-like artifacts. No more coins, masks, nails, wedges, axes, etc. It starts sending down fish and frogs again -- fish and frogs were all that seemed to be sent down from the gelatinous areas, sometimes, in the first third of the book.

After this happens, the next thing to occur is that the watery area in the sky turns into -- ice! Ice starts falling from the sky -- not hail (which had fallen from the sky in the first third of the book), but actual chunks, sometimes even huge blocks, of ice! And sometimes frogs and fish are actually embedded in the ice!

Fort's emotional state is freezing back up -- because of this psycho-tropism he had regarding the psychic forces he was allowing to come forth (in his narrative-manipulation of this genuine data of anomalous experiences).

This ice then develops into large disks of ice floating in the sky. The large disks of ice even eclipse the sun -- which is interesting, considering the following sections of the book are all about bodies being tracked travelling across the sun, the moon, and other planets.

At one point, the disk of ice even fragments -- suddenly bursts into pieces.

Fort quotes the Monthly Weather Review, regarding an event that took place on June 3, 1894, in Portland, Oregon:

"(The sight) gave the impression of a vast field of ice suspended in the atmosphere, and suddenly broken into fragments about the size of the palm of the hand."

For the time being, I would say, Fort's communication has been cut off, at such a close distance, at least, with these unconscious elements which have been exchanging images with him through Fort's own narrative-manipulation of data.

Fort sees an icy area in the sky -- but it no longer has any real integrity. It's sagging in the middle, and it's even forming icicles -- melting. Fort tries to justify this with a philosophical invention:

"A vast field of aerial ice -- it is inter to this earth's gravitation -- but by universal flux and variation, part of it sags closer to the earth, and is susceptible to gravitation -- by cohesion with the main mass, this part does not fall, but water melting from it does fall, and forms icicles -- then, by various disturbances, this part sometimes FALLS IN FRAGMENTS that are protrusive with icicles."

I capitalized the "FALLS IN FRAGMENTS" for emphasis. This is not a whole disk of ice. It's fragmented.

From this, Fort moves directly to a discussion -- which is as far as I've gotten for this post -- and it doesn't show any signs of stopping soon, where I stopped -- of sightings of celestial bodies passing in front of the sun, moon, and planets.

But right as Fort begins to discuss these far away objects (he moved them there himself, through his narrative-manipulation, after their closeness to his own psychic earth became too strong for him to handle), he makes mention of the Spirit of the Era. This, in Fort's theory, is the greater quasi-reality of which we are all a part.

All scientists adhere to a greater system of science. And this science is a product of the age. The age is charged with the Spirit of the Era -- which is the greater attempt at Localization of the Universal, to which, basically, everything in our quasi-existence surrenders itself.

"The dominant spirit of the era -- to which all minds had to equilibrate or be negligible, unheard, submerged. -- The system that was growing up independently of all (individual) astronomers."

In my opinion, Fort has been frightened by his own imagery. I believe he had to insist, at the beginning of his book that everything was falling from the sky (though a lot of it does really seem to have been falling from the sky!) was because he was afraid of the earth, the Dionysian, the feminine, whatever you want to call it. When he got over his fear, elements of the unconscious came to earth, showed up in the earth. But they took on too much power, and Fort had to banish them.

Banishing these forces from earth again, Fort suddenly saw the benefit of excluding things from his system. He started seeing things through the scientists' eyes. He now saw how a psychic life could benefit from excluding things that frightened it, like scientists excluded things that it couldn't handle.

Again, Fort paints a picture of a science that is false, a bubble which is about to pop. But it doesn't pop. Because now it is actually held together by this exclusionary tactic:

"Astronomy and inflation: and by inflation we mean expansion of the attenuated. Or that the science of Astronomy is a phantom-film distended with myth-stuff -- but always our acceptance that it approximates higher to substantiality than did the system that preceded it."

Before this time, Fort had mentioned planets. But the planets he mentioned did not have the personalities that they have after this point. Super-Romanimus, Super-Israelimus, and Azuria are all planets with people on them -- super-missionaries, etc.

But, now, suddenly, the planets themselves are the things with personality -- again, due to Fort's narrative-manipulation of the genuine data.

The first planet that begins to appear is Vulcan -- the most fragmented (so far) of all Fort's creations, but a planet so powerful that it actually manages to kill one of his characters. Leverrier makes all the wrong guesses about Vulcan, thinking it is one planet, when it is really a whole lot of different planets. He's so disappointed by this fact that he dies.

Vulcan is, in one sense, as far away from Fort as it can possibly be. But even at that range, the psychic forces are still felt so powerfully by Fort that they have the power to kill him.

Fort says that, "In a way, at this point occurs the crisis of our whole book."

I'd agree with him there. He continues, "Formulas are against us."

That's interesting. But how does Fort follow up, *after* he introduces another planet -- breaking up and then coming back to his Vulcan story?

"Our acceptance is that Leverrier never did formulate observations. -- That he picked out observations that could be formulated. -- That of this type are all formulas."

If Fort were looking at Leverrier as a part of his own psychic life, he'd see how he had banished the psychic giants and fairies from earth and sent them out to the distant reaches of space. But how this banishment of observations that could not be formulated actually managed to kill him, or to kill him in the character of Leverrier.

Nevertheless, as soon as Fort recognizes that he's gone too far by sending his giants and fairies (or his Monstrator and Vulcans?) all the way out to the sun, he already begins to draw them back in!

I think this is an incredible statement of Fort's psychic strength. And it is interesting that at this point, Fort talks about the physical evolution of life from the reptilian state to the mammalian state -- which I think Jung would attest is a symbol of the healthy psychic development of the personality:

"If, in an embryo, some cells should not live up to the phenomena of their era, the others will sustain the scheduled appearances. Not until an embryo enters the mammalian stage are cells of the reptilian stage false cells."

Again, Fort speaks of a reversal of action. Obviously he experienced a severe psycho-tropism -- a repulsion. His emotions froze, went all the way to the sun, and were powerful enough to kill the image of Leverrier within him. But he's hoping that psychic energy does not have to work according to what people nowadays accept as immutable physical laws:

"Some day some BRAIN will conceive a way of beating Newton's third law -- if every reaction, or resistance, is, or can be, interpretable as stimulus instead of resistance -- if this could be done in mechanics, there's a way open here for someone to own the world."

I emphasized "BRAIN" to make it clear that Fort was talking, at least partially, about a psychic process. Also -- "own the world" would mean take control of one's own world, instead of being property. It would mean allowing the personality to individuate.

Fort goes on to discuss his concept of "dirigible worlds," or planets and super-constructions (world-sized spaceships) without orbits, which can conduct themselves wherever they wish to go. In other words, Fort's pyschic energies may have been banished all the way to the sun. But they can direct themselves, as "dirigible worlds," back to the earth.

Here, Fort makes the extremely exciting statement: "The two great commandments: -- Thou shalt not break Continuity. -- Thou shalt try."

He follows it up with this statement, a kind of condensation of his understanding of the psychic process he's been through so far:

"It is the system that pulls back its variations, as the earth is pulling back the Matterhorn. It is the system that nourishes and rewards, and also freezes out life with the chill of disregard."

But Fort wishes to break free from the system -- and even sees that drifting too far into the system would be a loss of his identity. But he wishes to retain his identity. So he's willing to let his psychic life come back to him, to his "own world," this Fortean realm of imagination compounded of genuine data of anomalous phenomena.

It is at this point that Melanicus -- the Satanic planet described above -- becomes known.

Melanicus and Monstrator may have been planets with personalities. But Melanicus really is a personality. Melanicus is the Devil with wings as large as a planet.

Fort begins discussing the problem of evil at this point -- and, in my opinion, seems to be frightened of a too-humanized image of his pyschic life. He seems to flee from the image of Melanicus, and he drifts into a horribly convoluted discussion of philosophy.

But what's interesting in this discussion is that, whereas before Fort had always made reference to the Absolute as the Absolute -- in his philosophizing, anyway -- he now has a place in his philosophy for the Negative as well as the Positive Absolute.

"It would seem that Intermediateness is a relation between the Positive Absolute and the Negative Absolute. But the Absolute cannot be related."

"It seems thinkable that the Positive Absolute can, by means of Intermediateness, have a quasi-relation, or be only quasi-related, or be the unrelatd, in final terms, or, at least, not be the related, in final terms."

Moving from a discussion of evil, through a discussion of the Negative Absolute (which, I'm pretty sure Fort has brought into his *philosophical* discussions for the first time), Fort now makes this comment about free will:

"In Intermediateness, there is only the paradoxical: that we're free to do what we have to do."

Suddenly, Fort's unconscious is communicating with him again -- through evidence collected of "cup marks," which he takes to be something like electronic lettering actually cut into stone faces, all over the world, "except in the far North, I think." In other words, except in the place full of ice.

At one point these "cup marks" are found all over a Chinese plaza. The people there assume a Devil (Melanicus?) made the marks.

Suddenly -- Fort moves from these communications into Angels -- bright hordes of Angels, which Fort assumes are making a crusade.

How quickly Fort's psyche has moved! It was all the way over in Mercury. Then it was flying to earth in the form of the Devil-Vampire-Planet Melanicus. Now it's already hovering over the earth in the guise of a multiplicity of 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 Dore pictured so often."

But -- it's obvious here -- that Fort's major form of defense, as it has been all this time, is to fragment identity. He had to fragment his Devil Melanicus to make it into "safe" angels.

Fort seems to be afraid here of the control that the angels would have over him if they were all transmuted back into Melanicus:

"I should say that now we're under cultivation: that we're conscious of it, but have the impertinence to attribute it to all our own nobler and higher instincts."

So the aliens, whose "property" we are, are cultivating us. If Fort weren't afraid (who wouldn't be afraid? I'd be afraid!), he'd realize that the Devil was involved in cultivating his soul. But Fort has to fragment the personality of the Devil into the multiplicity of the angels. He knows he's deluding himself in this.

Fort then relates -- a multiplicity -- of light and dark bodies that cause various levels of obscuration of the sun and moon. Sometimes these bodies are light, then dark, or dark, then light.

Suddenly Melanicus appears again! Fort seems to have allowed Melanicus to re-integrate into one figure. But first Fort asks the reader if *he's* forgotten Melanicus -- as if someone reading Paradise Lost could forget the Devil!

But Fort seems, again, to be serious about allowing the communications to return to him -- and, possibly, for personalities even to return to his earth. He understands the importaince of his work.

"Acceptance either way calls not for mere revision but revolution in the science of astronomy."

However, I think Fort -- who was really brave to let the giants and fairies come to his earth -- now realizes that, since he's living with one psychic structure, he can only develop an integrated personality by changing his currently dominant psychic structure with a different one. And that will take time and effort.

"All intellection is associative -- or that we remember that which correlates with a dominant."

And:

"Our own expression on evolution by successive dominants and their correlates."

However, the following quote is the most interesting statement by Fort so far. He seems to believe that he must change his psychic structure, or else he loses a chance at maintaining the integrity of his personality. But he also makes a comment about the moon -- where Melanicus seems to be hovering at this moment, that is also quite interesting.

"The point in Intermediatism here is: -- Not that to adapt to the conditions of quasi-existence is to have success in quasi-existence, but is to lose one's soul -- But is to lose "one's" chance of attaining soul, self, or identity."

"One indignation quoted from Proctor (an excluding scientist refuting the vision of swarms of angels) interest us: 'What happens on the moon may at any time happen to this earth.' -- That is just the teaching of this department of Advanced Astronomy."

This is the point where Fort gives his descriptions of evil as outlived virtue and incipient virtue.

Fort has developed his sense of evil from one of basically being possessed by the devil to one of either using an outmoded psychic structure in an attempt to integrate his personality, or using a too-young psychic structure in an attempt to integrate his personality.

I'll end this post by letting Fort have the last word. In one quote, he gives a good view of exclusion in science, and why conventional scientists are necessary to the world. In its plain sense, I think it's very good (though kind of cynical). But it also shows the point of view of Fort -- as needing a reinforcing element from his old psychic structure while his new one is developing.

It's also interesting to note that in the first quote, Fort again mentions a "shadow," which is how he recently described the planet-Devil-Vampire Melanicus.

The second quote shows that the new psychic structure, or "new dominant," is developing.

"It's bad for trade to have an intense darkness come upon an unaware community and frighten people out of their purchasing values. -- But if an obscuration be foretold, and if it then occur -- may seem a little uncanny -- only a shadow -- and no one who was about to buy a pair of shoes runs home panic-stricken and saves the money."

"But -- if we are in harmony with a new dominant, or spirit of a new era, in which Exclusionism must be overthrown; if we have data of many obscurations, not only upon the moon, but upon our own earth, as convincing of vast intervening bodies, usually invisible, as is any regularized, predicted eclipse. -- One looks up at the sky. -- It seems incredible that, say, at the distance of the moon, there could be, but be invisible, a solid body, say, the size of the moon."