Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (20 page)

The whole thing may have been originated, somehow, somewhere else, worked out beforehand, as it were, in the brain of something or somebody and is now being orthogenetically or chemically directed from somewhere; being thrown on a screen, as it were, like a moving-picture, and we mere dot pictures, mere cell-built-up pictures, like the movies, only we are telegraphed or teleautographed from somewhere else.
¹³

In short, the paranormal is writing, or projecting, us.

Dreiser's reference to orthogenesis is important, really important. Synthesizing Herbert Spencer's social Darwinism and Ernst Haeckel's monism (both of which the mystically inclined Dreiser loved), Fort moved beyond these systems to develop the idea, widely entertained at the time, that evolution is “orthogenetic,” that is, predetermined toward some future goal or end. For Fort at least, the same evolutionary force could be active in one's personal life as well. Hence Fort would often write in his correspondence of the “strange orthogenetic gods” who he felt were guiding him, often in a confused and mixed up sort of way, to do this or that. This was playful, mythical language for sure, but it was also sincere, and it witnessed to a real conviction in a kind of occult spiritual evolution at work in the world.
¹⁴

In
X
, however, Fort seems to have suggested that this controlling force is basically evil, and that, accordingly, we have little for which to hope. Our final goal is “the nothingness of a Nirvana-like state of mechanistic unconsciousness, in which there is neither happiness nor unhappiness.” Fort would later back down from this absolute mechanism. He would also back down from his thesis that X was emanating from Mars, which, since Percival Lowell's
Mars and Its Canals
(1906), was commonly believed to be lined by canals and inhabited by intelligent beings. This, by the way,
was
by no means a new idea, and it was shared by many well-known and respected astronomers.
¹⁵
Astronomers aside, Steinmeyer notes that Fort's Martian hypothesis “sounds like science fiction.” Indeed, it does.

But if the world is finally a Martian fiction for Fort, it is a fiction out of which we can, conceivably at least, awaken and “step off the page,” much like his imagined moving-picture villain stepping out of the movie screen. Fort, it turns out, is not finally bound to a mechanistic Nirvana. Hence Fort's fascinating reference to
X
in a reply to the charge that his writings were inconsistent. “In ‘X,'
” he mused, “I have pointed out that, though there's nothing wrong with me personally, I am a delusion in super-imagination, and inconsistency must therefore be expected from me—but if I'm so rational as to be aware of my irrationality? Why, then, I have glimmers of the awakening and awareness of super-imagination.”
¹⁶

Such striking lines strongly suggest that the acts of collection, comparison, and systematization were not simple or banal activities for Charles Fort. They contained awesome power. They constituted a kind of an occult metapractice that could lead, at any moment, to just such a sudden awakening. Hence Fort's obscure claim that “systematization of pseudo-data is approximation to realness or final awakening” (BD 22). He, at least, collected, classified, and compared to wake up, to become more fully conscious of reality-as-fiction. He wanted out of this bad novel.

Final awakening aside for a moment, Fort was unhappy with both
X
and
Y
and destroyed them, or so it is believed, before he finally set out to write his most famous published work,
The Book of the Damned
. He had also burned twenty-five thousand of his notes earlier in the century.
¹⁷
Apparently, he liked to burn things he had written—before, he suggested, they burned him. Living in a cramped apartment in a tenement building stuffed with hundreds of shoe boxes filled with tens of thousands of flammable sheets of paper was not exactly the safest thing to do. But one suspects reasons other than those concerning rational safety codes. Charles Fort, after all, was playing with fire in other ways too, and he certainly did not feel himself unduly bound to the self-imposed limits of reason.

In any case, he was about to experience his own awakening beyond reason's bounds. Still obsessing at the end of the alphabet, he wrote Dreiser in 1918 as he researched and wrote his way to what would become
The Book of the Damned
:

Dreiser!

I have discovered Z!

Fort!
¹⁸

The
Parable of the Peaches: Fort's Mischievous Monistic Life

Charles Hoy Fort was born on August 6, 1874, in Albany, New York, to an upper-middle-class family. They were grocers of Old Dutch descent. His mother died shortly after his youngest brother, Clarence, was born, when Charles was just four. Their father, Charles Nelson Fort, quickly remarried. Charles and his two brothers, Raymond and Clarence, appear to have hated their father. The boys referred to him in the plural, as “They” or “Them.” Charles Nelson Fort was a Victorian authoritarian figure who did things like beat his boys with a dog whip or smack them in the face when they could not pronounce King James English during their Bible lessons. One day, for example, little Charles kept referring to how Moses had “smut” the rock instead of having “smote” it. After adjusting his hat and necktie in the mirror, the father smote his child on the face to fix, once and for all, the boy's poor King James pronunciation.
¹⁹

And this was just the beginning. When the boys got too big to smote, “They” would lock the two brothers “in a little, dark room, giving us bread and water, sentencing us to several days or several weeks of solitude.” Already here, though, Fort's redeeming humor shines through. The boys would often sing to make the time go faster. “Then singing patriotic songs, half defiantly because of the noise we were making. About ‘Let freedom ring.' Adding, ‘Freedom don't ring here.' Hearing our new mother, under the air shaft, laugh at this. Then we, too, would laugh: for we could never be mean when others were not.”
²⁰
It is not difficult to see why Charles Fort grew up to question all authority. It is also not difficult to see why Steinmeyer suggests that X was not emanating from Mars but from Albany, New York, that is, from the memories of Fort's hated father and all those terrible, basically “evil,” controlling punishments.
²¹
In this view at least, Fort's paranoid extraterrestrial fantasy finds its psychological origins in overwhelming childhood trauma.

Or was it the physical abuse and emotional trauma that opened him up to the extraterrestrial gnosis?

Interestingly, Fort's intellectual penchant for finding anomalies or contradictions in systems of thought began precisely as the modern study of religion began, that is, with an honest recognition of the contradictions in that same King James Bible—smote, smut, and all. “When a small boy,” Fort explained, “we puzzled over inconsistencies in the Bible, and asked questions that could not be answered satisfactorily.” He was also quickly growing tired of the dull round of his upper-middle-class life. “We should not have expressed the heresy,” he writes in his typical
understated
humor, “but felt there was some kind of life higher than that of a dealer in groceries.”
²²
Between the Bible, the groceries, and the solitary confinement, he was also dreaming of becoming a naturalist, and he became fascinated with the problems and promises of classification as these were being practiced in natural history and the museums. Darwin again.

Not that he thought that things could ever be definitively classified into stable essences. Later in life, he would describe himself as a monist. He would think of the world as a vast Oneness where anything could become anything else, where things were not things at all but relations. Early in life, of course, he was not quite so abstract. But he found a way to express a similar intuition, this time in the terms of a prank involving the fruits, vegetables, and labels of Their grocery store. Enter the parable of the peaches. Fort himself tells the story in
Wild Talents
toward the very end of his life. It is repeated in most accounts of his life and work. In other words, it has become something of a legend. It goes like this.

“In days of yore,” Fort explains (he wrote like that), he was “an especially bad young one.” His punishment was to be sent to the grocery store on Saturdays, where he was forced to labor for his sins. This often involved the task of peeling off the labels from cans of fruits and vegetables of another dealer and pasting on his father's labels instead. In other words, it involved a commercial version of classification as deception. One day he found himself with pyramids of cans, but only peach labels left in his sticky armory. Here is what happened next:

I pasted the peach labels on the peach cans, and then came to apricots. Well, aren't apricots peaches? I went on, mischievously, or scientifically, pasting the peach labels on cans of plums, cherries, string beans, and succotash. I can't quite define my motive, because to this day it has not been decided whether I am a humorist or a scientist. (WT 850)

The moral of the parable is two-edged and remarkably nuanced. On one level, it appears to suggest that our classification schemes are more or less useful, and more or less deceitful, and more or less profitable. But they certainly do not accurately reflect the true nature of things. We sell someone else's goods and pretend they are ours. On another level, the parable appears to suggest something a bit deeper, namely, that even the real nature of things does not reflect the real nature of things. What appears to be plums, or cherries, or succotash is really all peaches. The deceitful label is true. The fraud is fact. Everything
is
one thing.

I
am reminded here of something once quipped about the bizarre facts of astrophysics and cosmic evolution: “Hydrogen is a light, odorless gas which, given enough time, changes into people.”
²³
Fort would have laughed at that one, and then added: “or peaches.”

Fort would continue to live out such mixing and matchings, and eat them. Steinmeyer tells the delightful story of Thanksgiving dinner at the Forts in 1917: Charles served up a new preserve he called “Topeacho,” a blend of tomatoes and peaches. He would also invent a dish called “To-pruno,” this time with tomatoes and, yep, prunes.
²⁴
Fort delights in such comedic transformations, which he also sees everywhere in the evolutionary process:

I think that
Thou Shalt Not
was written on high, addressed to fishes. Whereupon a fish climbed a tree. Or that it is a law that hybrids shall be sterile—and that, not two, but three, animals went into a conspiracy, out of which came the okapi. There is a “law” of specialization. Evolutionists make much of it. Stores specialize, so that dealers in pants do not sell prunes. But then appear drugstores, which sell drugs, books, soups, and mouse traps. (WT 976)

We are back to the peach labels.

The peach labels, the tree-climbing fish, and the poor okapi are all in turn reminiscent of another famous Fortean anecdote, that of a board game he invented called “Super-checkers.” This invention of Fort, which he apparently constructed some time in the late 1920s, involved the usual checkerboard design, except that Fort's board boasted 1,600 squares. “It was in a moment of creative frenzy,” he wrote. “I took a fat lady's gingham apron, some yards of cardboard, and several pounds of carpet tacks, and solved all the problems in the world.”
²⁵
By “solving all the problems in the world,” what Fort likely meant was that his Super-checkers game was like every other system human beings have invented: it was a
game
, with artificial rules that are more or less useful, but that can also always be bent or ignored and are in the end more or less arbitrary. The Fortean universe operates remarkably like this Super-checkers game. It is much too vast to keep track of, and if it appears to follow the rules we cast for it most of the time, it also “cheats” occasionally, particularly every time a frog or school of fish falls out the sky. Such a universe can hardly be trusted.

Looked at as a whole, what should we make of such a life, at once so ordinary and so extraordinary? And how exactly should we enter the utterly bizarre
world
of his books? Earlier, I referred to Fort as a journalist of the metaphysical. This is true enough, especially with reference to his early career as a journalist and later newspaper source-texts. But the label finally obscures as much as it reveals. When he has not been read as an inspired prophet, Fort has usually been read as a wit or entertainer, as a major inspiration of pulp fiction and sci-fi literature, or as a countercultural icon.
²⁶
Such understandings all carry their own truths, but such reception histories also tend to obscure the fact that Fort was also a systematic thinker who practiced a very definite comparative method, developed a philosophy of history that was oddly, presciently postmodern, and operated out of a sophisticated dialectical metaphysics that provided all of this with a very distinct grounding or base. I want to treat this Fortean comparativism, postmodern philosophy of history, and dialectical metaphysics, each in turn, before I then approach his dark mythology, and, finally, his magical anthropology.

Recall that the literary theorist Tzvetan Todorov defines the fantastic as “a break in the acknowledged order, an irruption of the inadmissible within the changeless everyday legality.”
²⁷
This could just as easily describe a Fortean text. Recall also that Todorov defines the fantastic in terms of a certain irreducible indeterminacy, that is, in terms of the reader's hesitation and indecision about whether what is encountered in the text is illusory or real. “The fantastic,” Todorov reminds us, “occupies the duration of this uncertainty.”
²⁸
Fort again saw the same irreducible indeterminacy in his subject matter. Hence his reflections on his own wavering opinions about what he calls “the very ordinary witchcraft” of telepathy: “When I incline to think that there is telepathy, the experiments are convincing that there is. When I think over the same experiments, and incline against them, they indicate that there isn't” (WT 962). This indeterminacy is not tangential to the subject. It is no fluke or anecdote. Like a quantum event that can be measured as a particle or a wave—and Fort knew all about this—this indeterminacy
is
the subject.